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SOCIAL LIFE 


f ADDRESSED TO 

ALL THE NATIONS 

OF THE 

CIVILIZED WORLD; 

IS A 

DISCOVERY OF THE LAWS OF NATURE 

RELATIVE TO 

Suntan existence. 


Bt JOHN STEWART, 

THE TRAVELLER, 


LONDON| 

PRINTED FOR J* GINGER, NO. PICCADILLY, 
1803 . 




(Price Two Shillings.^ 






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Printed by S. Gosnell, 
3-ittle Queen Street, Holborr 


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- 

1 


THE 

TOCSIN 

OP 

SOCIAL, LIFE, 

&C. 


To render the voice of an obscure individual the Tocsin 
of the world, or the object of universal attention, I shall 
not follow the example of ancient or modem prophets* 
to claim relationship with a personified universe, testified 
by juggling tricks, called miracles or delusive predictions* 
couched in ambiguous terms so as to quadrate with any 
occurrence, and suit the most capricious interpretation. 

I shall appropriate my claim of attention to the im¬ 
proved state of human intellect, by exhibiting such im¬ 
portant discoveries of the laws of nature as will alarm 
while they instruct every thoughtful human being relative 
to its own interest, or enjoyment of good in time and 

The important discovery which is to establish my 
high claim to universal attention, is simply this ;—That 
all bodies are in a perpetual state of transmutation, in 
a 2 composition 


futurity 



( 4 ) 

Composition or decomposition, that is, life and death $ 
that nothing can be created, and nothing annihilated ; 
that what is called identity, or individuality of mode, 
is nothing but a succession of matter and its powers; 
and that when the clue of that succession breaks, identity 
ceases, while its substance, or essential matter that formed 
it, revolves in dispersed particles or atoms into states of 
new successions of matter and its powers, or identities, 
in an endless course of transmutations, or circulations 
throughout the universe. 

That this important and awfully interesting discovery 
may not be confounded with the jargon of the schools, 
or the gibberish of metaphysics, I entreat the sovereigns 
of Europe td order their several academicians to suspend 
their trifling pursuits of literature, their research of mosses, 
butterflies, and caterpillars’ eggs; to divert the labour 
of chemists from the less important relations of air, 
acids, and minerals, to the great object of all study, 
Man in his momentous relations to surrounding nature . 

The process or trial of my discovery I would recom¬ 
mend to be pursued in the following manner: first, let 
the chemist expel from his thoughts all propensities of 
will and prejudices of associated ideas, and proceed to 
analyze the human body with the same pure and dis¬ 
passionate reason as he would a piece of brute matter. 
In such a state of mind, what difference could he dis¬ 
cover between the action of thought in the animal body, 
or the fermentation of a vegetable body ? they are both 
very complicated motions, concealing their principles of 
causation. What then could induce a true philosophical 
chemist to determine, that upon the decomposition of 
an animal body its qualities were fixed, and upon the 
decomposition of a vegetable its qualities were dispersed 
arid transmuted ? 


( s ) 

Again, wefe he to examine the word Creation, 
which means, to make something out of nothing, pure 
reason would discover a palpable contradiction, as well 
as the word Annihilation, which imports, the reducing 
something into a state of nothing, which is equally 
impossible and contradictory. 

The last part of my discovery to be submitted to a 
strict chemical process, is the transmutation of matter; 
that is, the same identical substance which forms any 
existing mode of* animal, vegetable, fossil, or brute 
matter, upon its dissolution, by decay or death, is dis¬ 
persed in all its parts, and again combined separately 
and partially in every possible form of being, according 
to the poet, 

“ All forms that perish, other forms supply.** 

The chemist must observe, in the decomposition of 
the human body, no difference whatever from that of 
all other bodies, and must confirm by his experience 
the above axiom of the poet, which is nothing more 
than a description of my important discovery, which the 
poet himself might have claimed the invention of, if he 
had not afterwards contradicted himself in a metaphysical 
gibberish. 

Divines may apprehend their metaphysical province 
invaded and superseded by this system of human che¬ 
mistry ; but I think I can obviate their fears by the 
following considerations. This system of human che¬ 
mistry offers, indeed, a new kind of rewards and pu¬ 
nishments, by delivering over existent generations and 
nations to suffer the evil and enjoy the good of their own 
laws and policy, as re-existing in the rising and succes¬ 
sive generations :— e, g. The body of the tyrant who 
first invented the relation of a slave: many particles or 
5 atoms 


C 6 ) 

atoms of that body have since been revolving in the iden¬ 
tity of slave through the incalculable cycle of thousands 
of ages ; and though no remembrance of past identity 
accompanies their divided transmutation, the interest of 
pain and pleasure is not at all affected by the loss of 
memory, since it was the action of the same atoms in a 
different combination, that has been the cause of their 
actual sufferance of evil or enjoyment of good. * 

Individual subjects, in their characters of master, 
parent, and man, in a kind or cruel treatment of neigh¬ 
bours, relatives, tenants, servants, and cattle, prepare by 
example, custom, and habit, those conditions pf com¬ 
fort or torment of life, which, being perpetuated to 
future ages, must become receptical stations of sensitive 
life to meet their own transmutation of atoms in the 
alternate and endless progress of dissolution, and separa¬ 
tion, and recomposition in life and death. 

This alchymy of human nature does not at all inter¬ 
fere with or supersede the mysteries of theology, called 
religion, which postpones to an indefinite period the 
epocha of a metaphysical existence, called the day of 
judgment, when the universal power of nature is sup¬ 
posed to assume the personification of human nature ; 
and intelligence to change the laws of the universe into 
a new dispensation of human legislation, or rewards and 
punishments. 

This new order of a metaphysical, mythological, and 
religious universe, according to divines, may not take 
place for millions of ages, which leaves an immeasurable 
interval to the province of philosophy to economize 
human action and human intelligence into the worship 
of nature; that is, the augmentation of good, and dimi¬ 
nution of evil, to the whole sensitive system in time and 
futurity, without at all interfering with the dispensation 

of 


( 7 ) 

of mystery supposed to commence at an indefinite period* 
called the day of judgment. 

Religious worship* consisting in the personification of 
universal power and mystic rites and ceremonies* is 
placed beyond the boundaries of intelligibility* and 
claims the acquiescence of faith. 

Philosophy pursues the road of intelligibility, and 
viewing the visible and comprehensible part of the uni¬ 
verse as one organized body* circulating its atoms 
through all its parts* like the human body* which con¬ 
veys in its circulating fluids the matter of the toe to be¬ 
come 4he matter of the brain* and ^ice versa. 

This experimental knowledge developes the unity of 
essence of self and nature as the integral part of a stu¬ 
pendous whole* whose body matter is* and power the 
soul* modified throughout all systems, and consummate 
in each ; that is* the human system can have no energy- 
in its mode beyond intelligence, which may be called 
a constituent part of universal power, or a wheel in the 
great machine of the universe. 

This intelligence, or human mode of universal power, 
is charged with the consummation of the sensitive system 
in the worship of nature; or such a conduct of human 
action as may augment good and diminish evil in time 
and futurity in the mundane sphere, the boundary of 
the human mode of universal power. 

This developement of the constitution of nature, and 
its true worship, holds forth a more impressive language 
to the tyrants of the earth than all the volumes of my¬ 
thological anathemas, tempered by pardon. The king 
or legislator who permits the traffic of human flesh, or 
riots in silly pomp and splendour at the expense of his 
subjects' misery, or that of conquered and desolated na¬ 
tions, no tears of religious penitence can change the 

laws 




( 8 ) 

laws of nature, or impede the consequences of those 
evil actions which the atoms in the mode of king must 
perpetuate to their own transmutation into modes of 
subjects in an incalculable epocha of futurity. 

While historians hold up their names to the execra¬ 
tion or applauses of distant ages, what effect will these 
narratives of fame or infamy of names have upon new 
modes of being, which contain the divided atoms or 
foody of the hero in a state of joy or sufferance, origi¬ 
nating from their action in a previous and different 
union ? 

The individual citizen or subject, whose sphere of 
action is restricted to private life, has, however, a very 
extensive province of energy in example, habit, and 
custom;—these produce fashion, and this makes very 
extensive laws. 

Why are millions of our female fellow-creatures in 
Asia kept in confinement or in prison all their lives, 
while in Europe this sex enjoys the liberty of manhood ? 
This evil of Asia does not proceed from the tyrant’s law, 
fout from the custom of individuals governed by fashion. 

These considerations should dispose every individual 
to conspire by example, habit, and custom, to generate 
such fashions as may diffuse the greatest degree of com¬ 
fort to all conditions of life, to treat a wife as a compa¬ 
nion, not as a slave ; to treat servants with kindness and 
liberality, to be generous to tenants, kind to foreigners, 
and humane to our cattle : such a private conduct will 
grow from example into fashion, and procure the esta¬ 
blishment of such customs as will render all sensitive 
life a happy stage of sensation to reward its authors with 
the happiness of time in their existing modes, and pre¬ 
pare for their change in dissolution and recombination, 
future stages of their well-being. 


This 



( 9 ) 

This important discovery of the constitution of nature, 
should it fail to impress the minds of my readers with 
the most awful and animated attention, will, however, 
be a most sacred pledge to the world at large, that the 
man who acknowledges, that is, understands, the unity 
of all being, in essence, interest, and duration, can have, 
no partial attachment to individuals, sects, or nations; 
and can have no motive or object but universal good ; 
and thus qualified, his character alone, independent of 
his doctrines, has a most sacred claim to the attention 
of all nations, sects, and individuals throughout the 
world. 

“ Slave to no sect, and bigot to no mood, 

“ X look through Nature on to Nature’s good.” 

It may be proper, in this place, to offer to the world 
a short account of an author who advances such high 
claims and pretensions to instruct the human species in 
the knowledge and worship of Nature. 

At the age of eighteen I gave up all pursuits of fortune, 
and set out to travel over all the interesting parts of the 
world ; I felt a strong influence from a Persian proverb, 
which says, i( Manhood increases in the ratio of travels.” 

J verified the proverb by my own experience; my heart 
expanded in sympathy, and my head increased its intel¬ 
lectual power, not in the futile knowledge of common 
travellers (plants, animals, dresses, and customs), but 
in the important knowledge of man in his relations tq 
all nature. 

This moral science, by its new and doubtful discri¬ 
minations, gives the most powerful exercise to reason, 
in calculating and adjusting equations of good and evil. 
Physical sciences, having all their propositions and axioms 
B jSxeds 


,o 


C *0 ) 

fixed, give exercise to memory alone, as judgment and 
reason have nothing to calculate. 

The constant novelty of observation and reflection 
produced in my mind the highest degree of sensibility. 
The chord of thought in this high and perpetual state of 
tensity, was capable of sounding the most delicate notes 
of discrimination, (guarding against metaphysical dis¬ 
criminations without notes), the element of all know¬ 
ledge. 

I discovered, with these advanced powers of reason 
and perception, that the great cause of human misery 
was intellectual imbecility. I met in all countries ora¬ 
tors, poets, and historians, and men of knowledge and 
science; but I no where met with a man of sagacity or 
wisdom; every where I met with men of memory, but 
no where a man of thought. 

I have observed, in the course of my travels, that the 
inhabitants of the globe are diversified into five distinct 
classes ;—the savage, the pastoral, the agrestic, the com¬ 
mercial, and the civic : that these several classes rise 
in the order above mentioned on the scale of perception, 
from simple sense to the generalizations of science. 

The Indian savage, in conversation with the pastoral 
Tartar, would meet with modifications of thought gene¬ 
ralized into government and property, that to him would 
be unintelligible; in the same manner the husbandman 
of Asia, in a discourse with the Tartar, would carry the 
discriminations of thought on laws, institutions, and arts, 
beyond the generalizing power of the Tartar shepherds. 

Again, the commercial men of the continent of 
Europe, in discourse with the husbandman of Asia, 
expanding the generalizing faculty of perception into, 
commerce, arts, and sciences, would be unintelli¬ 
gible 


( It ) 

’giole to tlie Agrestic man. Next comes the civic class 
of Britons and Americans, who are distinguished from 
all nations by the administration of their own laws in 
juries and their constituted assemblies of civic rights. 
Should a Briton entertain a continental man on the sub¬ 
ject of civil liberty, the generalizations of perception 
would involve such a multiplicity of discriminations, that 
he would not be intelligible to a Frenchman, exemplified 
by the French revolution, which mistook every principle 
of civic rights. 

I am very apprehensive that the philosophy of the 
moral science, generalizing the universal relations of 
man and nature, will carry the faculty of perception as 
far beyond that of the civic man as this is beyond the 
savage 5 and that the following discourse will involve 
•such a complexity of discriminations in every idea, that 
it will appear unintelligible, and be termed eccentric by 
the civic Britan. 

I observed, education was every where conducted to 
teach men to play on the instrument of the under¬ 
standing with a winch, and not with the keys. The 
Turk has his modifications upon a barrel, as on the 
hand-organ; the Chinese, his particular barrel; and 
the Europeans, various barrels, of French, German, 
English, and Italian modifications. 

Whenever my understanding had struck a note from 
the keys of nature, which at a very early period I had 
substituted to the barrel of local education, I found the 
winch-player could not harmonize with my ideas or 
notes, but continued to turn round his barrel, and to 
suppose that the discord belonged to my instrument, and 
not to his. 

The intellectual imbecility produced by the use of t'h$ 
winch, instead of the keys, has been strongly exemplified 

jb z in 


( 12 ) 

in the French revolution: when the new notes of liberty'^ 
equality, and constitutional government were produced, 
there was not a single individual but what used a winch 
io play in concert with these key-notes; and the conse¬ 
quence was interminable discord. 

The English and American nations are the only people 
who play upon the instrument of the understanding with 
both winch and keys ; the first in the hands of the 
vulgar, and the last used by a well-informed yeomanry. 
The: great tensity of sensibility produced by the action 
of the keys has generated a characteristic habit of 
thoughtfulness, which directs the key-players to accom¬ 
modate their notes to the barrel-players, whereby 
these latter are enabled to improve their barrels, and 
accord . them with the keys ; by which means the har¬ 
mony of social life progresses to perfectibility without 
interruption. 

The great object of all my travels, after discovering 
the relations of man to nature, was to form certain, 
rules of instruction, to teach the use of the mental keys 
instead of the winch, and thus to put man in full pos¬ 
session of intellectual power, in which consists all 
human energy, to render the mode of man an efficient 
and constituent instrument in the great machine of 
nature. 

Such has been the pursuit, such the life, and such 
the object of an author, who claims the attention of the 
whole world to the most important instruction that ever 
was offered to mankind, in a revelation of reason and 
nature, that, K true, must constitute the most memo¬ 
rable epocha of human existence, and meet with an 
inestimable opportuneness the present awful crisis threat¬ 
ening the extinction of social life. 


I shall 


( *3 ) 

I shall now proceed to sound my tocsin or alarm- 
bell, and form its first peal by an analysis of social policy 
in its elements, and from these construct a criterion for • 
the partial and general conduct of nations to enjoy prac¬ 
tical good, and advance it in the slow progress of ages 
through intellectual improvement (as the only practical 
mode of reform) to the characteristic perfectibility of 
human nature. 

To proceed in this analysis of human society, I shall 
first endeavour to trace the double elements of predica¬ 
ment and perfectibility; and as the latter is the goal of 
human energy, we must discover that point of theory 
before we can mark out the road of practical policy to 
progress in. 

The ultimate object of social organization or human 
policy is the multiplication of human energy, that is, the 
advancement of the moral and physical powers of man¬ 
kind, by which every individual is enabled, through the 
increase of intellectual power, to form the best possible 
desires, and to gratify them by the increase of physical 
power in the aid of his associates, and thus to procure 
the best possible state of well-being in time and futurity : 
and this state of well-being may be called the category 
of human energy, or that station of relative action which 
effectuates the culte or worship of Nature; which, 
according to the etymology of the Latin word, means no 
more than cultivation, or conducting means to attain 
their proper ends :— e • g. When the farmer opens the 
furrows with his plough, the sun co-operates with his 
genial heat, the air with its pabulum or nutrition, tbi 
water with its moisture, and the earth with its matricu¬ 
lation; all -these actions, if categoric and harmonious, 
may be called the worship of the different agents in the 
accomplishment of vegetation. 

5 


C H > 

In the same manner, nations, communities, &ncl indU 
victuals may be said to worship in the sensitive system* 
when the confederacies of different nations, the insti¬ 
tutions of states, and the customs of individuals shall 
all be constituted to harmonize with universal good iti 
time and futurity. 

Such is the goal of perfectibility, or recondite ele¬ 
ment of human association. I shall now consider the 
actual condition of human nature, to determine what 
institutions are best accommodated to enjoy actual, and 
prepare for improvable good. 

Mankind are every where at present in a state of fac¬ 
titious, and not natural society, whose institutions are 
all calculated to divide rather than multiply human 
energy; nations compete with nations for power. In so¬ 
cieties, every family forms a separate state, to invade, 
by superior knowledge and economy, the property of 
their neighbours, and to transmit the same to their 
posterity. In such a state of society, the unity and 
energy of civil power must be cultivated to provide for 
external and internal defence. In those countries where 
property and information are Restricted to a narrow 
circle, the energy of power must concentrate its spring 
in despotism, and relax itself through the gradations of 
limited monarchy, mixed government, and elective ma¬ 
gistracy, in all countries, in a just proportion of the 
extent of property and information in the mass of the 
population. 

In no country, however, must power be conferred on 
individuals who are deprived of all property, or possess 
it in too scanty a degree, to make any sacrifices to the 
political power of the state in taxes, or to feel any inte¬ 
rest in the support of law and order, by which the inhe¬ 
ritance 


( 15 ) 

jltance of property is secured; or to procure the means 
of leisure, study, education, and information. 

This important lesson of policy, confirmed throughout 
all the annals of history, in the revolutions of modem 
and ancient republics from freedom to slavery,, caused 
by popular insurrections, should be inscribed in letters of 
gold, and exposed on every church door in all constitu¬ 
tional communities, as the guardian instruction of civil 
liberty, couched in these words ; 

Democracy is the cause of anarchy, 

Anarchy the cause of despotism. 

In the present factitious state of Civilized life, the 
enjoyment of actual good, and the progress to perfectible* 
good, can be made only by the stability and energy of 
civil power giving efficacy to the advancement of the 
knowledge of man alone, and individual instruction, im 
sagacity rather than science. 

By instruction, I do not mean a course of classical, 
scientific studies, to overload the memory, and thereby 
obtund the judgment; but a domestic tuition, conducted 
by parents themselves, to form the head and the heart 
to sagacity and virtue. 

The present system of literate and scientific education, 
teaching Greek to the farmer, Latin to the apprentice, 
and mathematics to servants, has produced a precocious 
and flippant faculty of observation that prompts to pre¬ 
cipitate judgment, and precipitate action, and defect of 
thought. 

Demagogues, taking advantage of this temperament, 
propose delusive theories of liberty and equality to the 
multitude, who, void of contemplation to examine the 
delicate relations of theory and practice, and feeling the 

weighty 



( *6 ) 

weighty pressure of luxury, are impelled to lay aside all 
disposition of subordination, and all regard to social 
discipline, in hopes of meliorating their condition by a 
change in the order of society. 

To meet the present crisis of the moral and political 
world, I have composed a system of education, to teach 
mankind contemplation, to keep pace with observation, 
and to instruct them in sagacity of thought rather than 
remembrance of science* 

In this course of simple tuition, the parent may be 
the preceptor to his own family, to teach the, young 
ideas how to shoot in their own energy, instead of 
stuffing the memory with the ideas of other men’s minds, 
and destroying thereby the faculty of judgment, con¬ 
templation, and ratiocination. 

This system of education will accommodate itself to 
all states and stages of society; and should the present 
organized anarchy of French military power extend itself 
over all the civilized world, overthrowing .in its progress 
schools, colleges, and universities, this simple system 
of tuition, substituting good sense to science* the pater¬ 
nal hbme to the academy, and the parent to the peda¬ 
gogue, will meet the direful crisis with the only remedy 
for anarchy and discord, thoughtfulness and sagacity in 
the public mind. 

The discipline of the understanding, as synonymous to 
good sense, will teach all ranks of society, that infelicity 
does not attach itself to grade or profession; the peasant, 
when he shall be able to contemplate the subject of 
simple observation, will discover, that his condition^ if 
provided with wholesome food, clothing, and lodging, 
with leisure for instruction, recreation, and repose^ 
offers all the comforts of health, cheerfulness, and con¬ 
tentment. 

The 



( I? ) 

"The landlord^ improved by the education of good 
dense, substituted to science, would discover in his 
condition a more ample circle of existence, in pro¬ 
moting the happiness of his peasants in a liberal economy 
of labour and recompense; and, instead of passing life 
in the agonies of disease, occasioned by crapulency, and 
the corroding eares bf luxury and avarice, he would rise 
above the peasant on the scale of intellectual existence, 
and make the happiness of condition commensurate with 
its energy. 

The magistrate, through the education of good sense, 
identifying the public with individual good, would 
equalize the burden of services and protection of law to 
all ranks of the community; and thus organizing the 
harmony and contentment of his own state to co-operate- 
with the confederacy of surrounding nations, he would, 
by promoting the good of predicament, as the measure 
of perfectible good in time and futurity to the whole 
human species, develope the energy of universal power 
in the mundane system, and live in the exalted sphere 
of intellectual life, with the commensurate (joy of intel¬ 
lectual happiness. 

The military tyrant who shall impose a system of 
power upon a nation incongenial to their habits, educa¬ 
tion, and customs, to enjoy the pomp of parade and 
power, pursues his imperious habitudes or passion for 
dominion, even against his own conviction : like the 
glutton impelled by the trifling appetite of taste, though 
experience has proved its evil, he feeds himself into 
disease and agony ; so the tyrant vanquishes himself into 
remorse, fear, care, the abhorrence of his subjects and 
the whole human species, and transmits to an incalcu¬ 
lable futurity all the horrors of war, famine, ignorance, 
pestilence, and anarchy, to meet the circulation of his 
e owfl 




( is ) 

own atoms in a long succession of miserable generations 
in the mundane system. 

The education of good sense would develope a system 
of actual and improvable good, uniform, and accommo¬ 
dated to the policy of all nations, in the following manner: 

The foundation of all governments, however they may 
be shaken by revolutions, must ultimately take their 
site in the habits, customs, opinions, and education of 
the people. In America, elective government will prevail $ 
in England, mixed government 5 and over all the con - 
tinent of Europe, hereditary power, under different forms 
of monarchy and aristocracy. 

The various forms of government are all calculated to 
give unity and organism to the social body, and differ 
only in the administration of protection and justice, in¬ 
fluenced and produced by the moral temperament of the 
people. 

Revolutions and reforms of government give no ad¬ 
vancement to the perfectibility of human nature, as may 
be exemplified by the present states of Great Britain, 
America, France, and Ireland. 

The revolution of Britain has produced corruption, 
dissipation, thoughtlessness, and disloyalty. Learning, 
or lettered education, ha3 elevated a great mass of the 
population to an equality of simple observation, without 
any increase of contemplation, the great master-faculty 
of mind. 

The middling and lower classes of the people reading 
newspapers, and witnessing the verbal discussions of 
erudition, and the idle sophistry of learned magistrates. 
Jay aside all respect for learned authority, which has 
been the pivot of subordination throughout all history 
among all nations ; and this change in the mind pre¬ 
pares the most awful discord for social life, 

3 


If 


( 19 ) 

If we peruse the history of Great Britain previous to 
the revolution* we shall discover in the manners of the 
people more probity* more loyalty, and more thought¬ 
fulness j and in the government a more perfect admi¬ 
nistration of protection and justice : I do not mean legal 
justice* but a justice of condition that renders the yeo¬ 
manry rich* and the peasantry comfortable. 

The revolution has opened a wide field to parties and 
factions, in whose opposition protective power is ^en¬ 
feebled, the corruption of state policy rendered necessary* 
the people seddeed from their loyalty * and in the pro¬ 
gress of luxury and avarice* that peasantry* who before 
the revolution were the happiest of the whole earth* are 
now more oppressed with labour* want* and misery, 
than the Russian serf or Turkish slave. 

The English peasantry being the most thoughtful peo¬ 
ple* must necessarily be the most feeling people in the 
world; and the least privation of domestic comfort in 
this country, would convey a stronger sensation of evil 
upon the great chain of human existence than the sale of 
a whole family of unfeeling Russian peasants, or a con¬ 
script family of thoughtless French farmers* transported 
to the deserts of Africa to fight the cause of a civic mon¬ 
ster that involves the desolation of their own country with 
that of the whole human species. 

The revolution of America has contradicted one of the * 
most plausible axioms of political theory, which is* that 
republican principles ennoble the mind * and generate virtue. 

The moral temperament of the American people* 
while under a colonial government* was strongly influ¬ 
enced by the residence of British inhabitants: the probity 
of British merchants* the nice sense of honour and cha¬ 
racter of British officers* both in the civil and military 
departments* produced sentiments of loyalty and patriot¬ 
ism in the sacrifice of private to public good, 
e 2 


The 


( 20 ) 

The revolution drove from the country into exile that 
portion of the population which had been imbued with 
virtue, loyalty, and patriotism, by British intercourse; 
and breaking down the barriers of rank, and the dis¬ 
tinction of gentleman and plebeian, the pride of honour 
and integrity was annihilated, and the moral tempera¬ 
ment of the people was confounded in one uniform dis¬ 
position of contracted selfishness and plebeian baseness 
of character, exemplified in a most notorious want of 
punctuality and probity in the discharge of debts, ac-- 
companied with a most shameless avowal, and a total 
absence of all sentiment. 

The political state of the country menaces the most 
awful anarchy ; the population divided into four distinct 
classes and interests, slaves, Indians, settlers, and pro¬ 
prietors; the first ready to rise and massacre the white 
population; the second waiting the moment of resent¬ 
ment and plunder; the third hostile to every kind of 
law, order, and government; and the last selfish, dis¬ 
united, and ambitious. 

A French settlement, landing and establishing itself in 
Louisiana, with a population formed by the refuse of 
atrocious revolutionary characters exiled from France, 
would be the signal of the most tremendous and exter- 
minative anarchy ; and such are the fruits of revolution 
and independence in America. 

What have been the effects of revolution in Ireland ? 
The natives of this country, characterized by an ex¬ 
treme want of thought and contemplation, are unin¬ 
fluenced by the terrors of law, which act only on re¬ 
flective minds: military power can alone coerce such a 
population by opposing real force to crime : civil go¬ 
vernment can give no protection to its agents. The chief, 
the judge, the jury, the constable, the disbanded yeo¬ 
manry and militia, would all fall victims to the individual 

resentment 


( 21 ) 

tesentment of a people who can think only of the evil 
they feel, and reason not beyond their sensations. 

The late rebellion in Ireland has furnished abundant 
examples of this thoughtless atrocity, inflicting death 
on witnesses, houghing cattle, murdering loyal subjects, 
and suspending by these acts of terror all the power of 
courts of judicature. Martial law saved the country by 
placing it under the protection of military power; which 
being always assembled, and acting in a body, they met 
force with force, and artifice with artifice, and retired 
to their barracks out of the reach of individual resent¬ 
ment. 

Previous to the revolution, the government of Ire¬ 
land was a military system appropriate to the temper of 
the people. Since that event, the delusive syren Inde¬ 
pendence, the watch-word of factious and ambitious 
demagogues,! has prevailed on the Protestant interest to 
separate itself from a dependance on England, and pre¬ 
pare thereby the triumph of a Catholic population* 
whose stupid bigotry, bloodthirsty atrocity, imbecility 
of intellect, arising from an incapacity to think or con¬ 
template subjects, make its character a disgrace to the 
whole human species, and threaten to render that 
island a moral volcano, devouring its own entrails, 
and an object of awful vigilance to surrounding nations 
to confine its tremendous fury to its own crater. 

This unhappy country demanding dependance rather 
than independence for its prosperity, hangs like a mill¬ 
stone round the neck of England ; and if the present 
deluge of French military power is to increase, the de¬ 
fensive force of England, weakened by its extension to 
Ireland, and receiving from that country a treacherous 
substitute to create mutiny in the fleets, treachery and 
desertion to the enemy in the army, the single rampart 
of civilized nations will be overthrown, and the humar*j 

species 


f a* / 

species will decline from nations-to tribes, from tribes to 
companies pf military banditti, into pristine bar¬ 
barism. Thus Ireland and France are the only 
countries on the globe that counteract the great worship 
of Nature. 

The revolution of France has put a finish to the 
table ,o.f political experience; and if the volcano of its 
evils,shppid be extinguished before it overwhelms the 
civilized world, the awful lesson of its catastrophe may 
become ,the salvation of social life. 

The first important, lesson it exhibits to the world is, 
the danger of reform in the constitutive power of society. 
The .augmentation of numbers in the third estate of 
France was a simple reform of power that became the 
primary and sole cause of the fatal revolution* 

Useful and salutary reform consists in the improve¬ 
ment of the laws, and the administration of civil power, 
by organizing information into state councils, to aid the 
executive power with advice, but not to interfere with 
its authority, as has been lately exemplified by the con¬ 
duct of the Russian Emperor Alexander, in the reform 
of his senate and the administration of the laws. 

The second important lesson taught by the French 
revolution is, the necessity of individual dependance 
upon the public body or civil power, of the state. France, 
with the violence of revolutionary power, forces surround¬ 
ing states discordant in manners, laws, opinions, and 
interests, into her own aggregation, with the watch-word 
mdivmhility or dependance, while the English popula¬ 
tion, aggregated by similarity of laws, customs, opinions, 
and interests, are reduced by demagogues to adopt a 
contrary watch-word of divisibility or independence; 
and thus the independence of America, the independence 
of Ireland, &c. separate the twigs in the bundle of 
social union, and deliver over among the only civic 

people 


.& 


( 23 y 

people of the globe the Colossus of moral energy, the 
British empire, the germ of human perfectibility, to be 
destroyed by France, the Colossps of physical force, and 
the germ of contingency, anarchy, and degeneracy. 

The internal union of France, supported by militarv 
power, absorbs the individual into the public will, and 
thereby generates a complete unity, or body politic, 
while in England the rights of individuals, in juries, 
electoral suffrage, and popular assemblies, oppose the 
unity of the body politic, and render it almost defence¬ 
less in the assault of a despotic enemy, which, resembling 
the head in the human body opposed to a sudden assault, 
dictates defensive action to the members, while these 
engaged in deliberation refuse obedience, and life is 
lost. 

The language of demagogues nurtures this delusion 
by persuading the people into the exercise of sovereignty 
by mandatory instructions to their representatives upon 
all important occasions : thus, in times of danger, the 
people are to be called to council rather than to arms; 
and the energy of military assault is to,be opposed by the 
discordant deliberations of a mob # . 

The revolution of Franpe has dispelled . this popular 
delusion, and taught constitutional governments this im¬ 
portant lesson, that the deliberations of the people must 
cease, and the most implicit confidence must be .given 
to the executive on all occasions of urgency and danger. 

The next important lesson which the French revolu¬ 
tion holds out to a consternated world is, the danger of 
democratic power in all populous, rich, and commercial 
states, designating at the same time the true principles 
of all monarchical governments in hereditary power with 
the aid of state councils, without authority, and in all 

# The Speech of Sir Francis Burdett to a tavern mob. 

< v consti- 


( *4 ) 

constitutional governments the qualification of compe¬ 
tent property as the only test of information, interest, 
and civism in electoral suffrage. 

The last and consummate lesson of political experience 
to be drawn from the fate of all is, that revolutions of 
power produce evil, and that human perfectibility can 
advance only in the improvement of the knowledge of 
man’s nature, and through the discipline of intellectual 
powers of sagacity distinguished from science, 

Thus the revolution of France, in the short space of 
ten years, has displayed more political experience than 
'all the annals of universal history, and has generated a 
monster of military despotism that never was equalled 
in all the history of eastern conquerors. Alexander, Ta¬ 
merlane, Naudir Shaw, or Gengis Kaun, governed 
nations, whose property and persons they dared not and 
could not put in requisition. But the Consul of France 
has so completely subjugated both the mind and body 
of the thoughtless, frivolous, incivic people, that, when 
he draw§ his sword, he may be said to draw thirty 
million of people, forming a mere physical force ready 
to fall upon itself or its neighbours, just as the hand of 
power directs it. 

This monster of military power nurturing itself with 
foreign aqd domestic misery, acquiring energy from cor n 
ruptioq, and stability from anarchy, seems to prolong 
its life with the principles of dissolution and desolation. 

The capital, Paris, in violation of the principles of mo¬ 
rality in all civilized countries, is turned into a brothel 
and gaming-house to decoy and debauch the youth of all 
surrounding nations in a new species of commerce to 
obtain foreign property, depraving at the same time 
the morals of the nation, substituting gaming to in¬ 
dustry, and thereby producing ruin, indolence, and de¬ 
spair^ 




( 25 ) 

spair. The musket of a recruit is the only resources; 
arid the army is multiplied in the ratio of civic misery. 

A military government being in its principle hostile 
io commerce, this peaceful occupation of civilized na¬ 
tions must be abandoned, and arms and military support 
must be its substitute. The perpetuation of the con¬ 
sular powers depending on an elective senate, the 
generals will be excited to contention on the demise of 
their chief, and this interregnum of anarchy will demand 
a triumphant military power to arrest it. 

In this manner the civic monster of consular govern¬ 
ment will prolong its existence, making all return to con¬ 
genial and legitimate government impossible among a 
degraded, demoralized, disunited, thoughtless, and de¬ 
sperate people: exonerated at the same time from all civic 
duties and obligations of debts, treaties, usages, and 
laws of nations, expediency will be the watch-word of 
the monster as a prelude to devastation ; and the sur¬ 
rounding nations will be devoured one after the other, fet¬ 
tered with those loose obligations which the monster has 
broken loose from. 

I have the consolation, however^ notwithstanding 
these desponding reflections, to present to mankind at 
large the most simple means to resist, if not to destroy, 
this common enemy of man and nature. 

I have read the military journals of the French army with 
the most scrutinizing examination, and I have constantly 
observed that, the uninterrupted series of victories were 
owing to a spirit of jactitancy and gasconade, related 
precisely in the same terms — ce the columns rushed on 
With impetuosity, and the enemy fled in all direction.” 

The French army was at all times deficient in disci¬ 
pline. Insubordination naval, military, and civil, was 
jd every 




( 26 ) 

every where the consequence of the revolution* and 
impetuous assault became the only tactic of the troops* 

The allied armies* subject to the cautious and regular 
tactics of old established governments* were consternated 
by the mob assault of revolutionary armies* and dared 
not resist enough to put the gasconade to any proof. 

This proof was first opposed by the Russian armies* 
who detected the bugaboo of French victory* and drove 
the gasconading conquerors with as much ease as the 
regular troops of the line disperse tumultuous mobs of 
peasantry. 

The English army on the plains of Egypt produced the 
most consummate evidence of gasconade being the 
only tactic of the French armies. The English army 
consisted principally of militia or peasantry; the French 
army, of veteran soldiers* covered with domestic and 
foreign blood* inflated with the confidence of successful 
gasconade* and inured to the destructive elements of an 
Egyptian climate. Notwithstanding these advantages* 
the peasantry triumphed by solid resistance* opposed to 
a vapouring and tumultuous assault* that once failing, 
never returned again to trial. 

The campaign closed with an action that has left an 
indelible impression of the gasconading tactic of the 
French armies. The English commander informs his 
government that a party of six hundred French* ad¬ 
vancing with all the display of tumultuous and clamorous 
gasconade upon a body of two hundred English* these* 
instead of halting to give the French a firm reception, 
advanced to meet them; and these heroes of Jemappe* 
Lodi* and the Pyramids* fled with the utmost pre¬ 
cipitation from a very inferior force. 

To this irrefutable series of evidence I shall add one 
more which will complete conviction* and that is* that 

every 


( *7 ) 

every commander in chief of the French armies., whether 
taken from the office, the ranks, or the shop, suddenly 
appeared a genius in succession, as if the commission 
transferred and attached it to the appointment. The 
fact was, this gasconading tactic of assault was per¬ 
petually followed, and its success would have made a 
military genius of an old woman who conducted it. The 
great genius Custine, who had conquered and frightened 
the German nation, died a contemptible coward on the 
scaffold, where jactitancy and gasconade could no longer 
scare the enemy, the executioner. 

This convictive evidence of gasconade being the only 
tactic of the French armies, will encourage surrounding 
nations to confide in the superior strength of subordina¬ 
tion and discipline, the result of regular government; 
and by opposing resistance to one single assault, the 
talisman of gasconade will be broken, and victory and 
defeat will change sides with consternation and con¬ 
fidence, and no second assault will ever be attempted 
by the French armies upon those enemies who have 
once repelled them. This truth was exemplified by the 
British army on the plains of Egypt, which having re¬ 
pelled the gasconading tactic in one single battle, the 
French army never made any more assaults, but adopted 
a desponding, feeble, and unsuccessful defence, which 
terminated in a disgraceful and total defeat. 

If my opinion of the French power should be 
erroneous, and if their armies have conquered not by 
gasconade and mob assault, but by superior discipline 
and superior valour, which they must still possess, there 
will remain no remedy and no escape for civilized 
nations: Europe must prepare to retrograde (before fifty 
millions of ruffians) from regular governments to dis¬ 
persed military tribes, and to degenerate into a ferocious 
d 2 slate 


( 23 ) 

ttate of civic barbarism that would make the present 
state of simple savage life enviable. 

The sound of my Tocsin carries in its intonation of alarm 
these words .of instruction, incitement, and consolation 
to all civilized nations : Try them! try them! try them! 
that is, bring the gasconading assault to trial by ad¬ 
vancing to oppose assault to assault, and not waiting 
to receive it, which exposes the troops of regular go¬ 
vernments to panic and consternation. The words, Try 
them , try them , try them! should be inscribed on the 
standards of all regular governments as the signal of sal¬ 
vation or perdition, just as gasconade or firmness of 
discipline may be detected as the rise or downfal of 
French power. 

That I may not be suspected of English partiality in 
my censure on the French government, I will demon¬ 
strate the predicament of that country to be the most 
awful calamity that ever threatened the actual and im¬ 
provable good of the whole human species, 

. The revolutionary government having violated and 
brought into contempt every principle of morality, law, 
and order, by juridical assassination of its own subjects, 
and by a law of massacre of surrounding nations in 
warfare, this monster qf a revolution devouring daily its 
qwn offspring, was preparing a dreadful butchery of 
parties, in which the whole population must have been 
involved as heretofore in Jacobinical horrors. Bonaparte 
unfurled the standard of military power, and the fac¬ 
tions and people preferred despotism to the horrors of 
democracy. 

The establishment qf the consular power resembles 
more a camp discipline than a civic constitution. The 
instability of law produced by measures of expediency, 
I annihilate^ 


{ 29 ) 

annihilates all confidence, the essence of social organism* 
the distributer of subsistence to the population. • 

The proprietors, or monied men, withhold the circii* 
lation of property, in constant apprehension of forced 
loans, new laws, and sudden revolutions : the people 
are thus deprived of their proportion to excite industry, 
and provide subsistence, and the politic body is reduced 
to the same state of inanition with the human body, 
whose arteries, bound up, should refuse to circulate their 
blood into the smaller vessels. 

This desperate condition of the nation, which may be 
called a loss of the social state when we join in con¬ 
sideration the perpetuity of anarchy in the election of a 
consul, nurtures indolence, poverty, and vice \ and thus 
disposing the population to military employ and military 
power, forms a nucleus of calamity, that, if the force 
of the indivisible nations who conduct it should equal 
their magnitude, the whole world will be involved in a 
moral chaos. 

To this reflection my Tocsin replies, Try them! try 
them ! try them! and I would pledge my existence upon 
the success, that one regiment of regular government would 
beat ten of consular anarchy. I do not mean to impeach 
the courage of the French nation as individual men, but 
to exhibit a principle in the moral laws of nature, that 
discipline must triumph over indiscipline, however 
superior the numbers 3 and France can have no mili¬ 
tary discipline, and no tactic but mob assault, in the 
absence of law and civic government. 

I shall now proceed to address my Tocsin to all nations, 
locally and individually, to offer such instruction as 
may concentrate the force of the whole human species 
jnto a focus or organism of energy to enjoy the actual 

good, 


( 3 ° ) 

good, and improve the perfectible or future good of the 
whole mundane system, which I call the worship of 
Nature. 



To the American Nation. 

I address myself first to you, Anglo-American re¬ 
publicans, because you have taken the lead on those 
perfectible theories of policy which propose to establish 
government on the solid basis of law, rather than on 
the mutable bafsis of men, measures, ai;d expediency. 

Nature has placed your country in a favourable po¬ 
sition to make every experiment of human perfectibility. 
Insulated from the turbulent continent of Europe, exo¬ 
nerated from all her burdens and connexions, you are 
thus pledged to mankind to make your proportion of 
sacrifices of another kind to the general object of human 
happiness. 

While your states and townships are making new and 
easy experiments of political and moral association. 
Congress must establish a system of constitutional law 
to concentrate the force of the union, and form a stable 
and protective civil power. 

The civjc monster of consular power which has arisen 
in Europe, will oblige you to change your foreign policy, 
and seek the alliance of Great Rptain, the rampart of 
pivilized nations. 

Should the monster colonize Louisiana, it would not 
be for the purpose of commerce, which can have no 
.value in a military government, though its name may 
be mentioned from time to time to amuse the people; 
its object would be the extension of consular power. 
Hie colony would be used as a means to annihilate 
British commerce and British subsistence} to cut off 

the 


\ 

{ 3 1 ) 

the communication of this island with both continents* 
and force Britain to renounce her foreign and protective 
power, to preserve her domestic independence. 

Louisiana will form in America a nucleus of Jaco¬ 
binism, that, favoured by the democracy of faction, the 
insurrection of the slaves, and the predatory disposition 
of the Indian nations, cannot fail, like the jackal to the 
lion, to be the procurer and purveyor of the civic mon¬ 
ster, who will first fawn upon it with a Swiss protection, 
and then devour it. 

The peal of my Tocsin addressed to the American 
nation, prescribing that conduct which I call the worship 
of Nature in enjoying the good of time, and perfec- 
tuating it in futurity to the whole mundane system, 
contains the following admonition : 

The civic monster of France, hostile to the worship of 
Nature, by demolishing system and establishing con¬ 
tingency, pursuing power in the aggregation of nations 
to constitute a preponderaney of physical force, holds out 
this important admonition to all constitutional govern¬ 
ments, viz. to identify as wdde as possible, national po¬ 
pulation in similarity of laws, interests, and habits. 

The identification of national pow r er cannot be effected 
by simple alliance; it must be produced by incorporation 
and union of power. America must send her deputies 
to the parliament of Great Britain, and follow the ex¬ 
ample of Ireland in dissolving its own identity in one 
common empire. 

This union cannot be proposed or effected in America 
till the danger of French power has made an alarming 
progress in the southern states, facilitated by the savage 
habits of wild settlers, who, flattered by French anarchy 
with a relief from all taxes, establishments, and re¬ 
straints upon the occupation of territory, will be seduced 

into 


( 32 ) 

Into French alliance, and complete, instantaneously; th& 
overthrow of the southern states. 

The settlement of Louisiana bv the French,' with a 
military colony,- should be regarded by the northern 
states as an absolute invasion of the territory of America j 
an invitation should be sent by them instantly to every 
state in the confederacy to unite with England; and, if 
not complied with, they should declare themselves sepa¬ 
rated from the union, call to arms one hundred thousand 
militia, and send an embassy of incorporation to Great 
Britain i 

Such are the political measures Which place America 
in its true category of action and relation to surrounding 
nations, and constitute 4 the worship of Nature in the pre¬ 
servation of the system of civilized life against the tre¬ 
mendous anarchy of contingency^ threatened by the 
contention and uproar of military consular power. 

My Tocsin intonates the word education, in a most 
peculiar and appropriate manner to the American people^ 
to substitute the learning of sagacity to the learning of 
science; to teach men how to think rather than how to 
remember futile and useless knowledge; that is, to 
discipline the thoughts and faculties, to increase the 
power of the understanding, rather than by stuffing 
the memory to increase its useless, and redundant matter.. 

Such a system of education I have myself invented^ 
and shall publish in a short time as a necessary accessary 
to my Tocsin. I am happy in the mean time to ob^ 
serve, that the American people have, in some measure, 
anticipated the effects of my new system. This country y 
in the short period of one single century, has made 
more progress in the knowledge of man, than the Eu* 
ropean world has done in the whole epocha of human 
existence. 

The 


( 33 ) 

The European world, both ancient and modern, 
occupied with the absolute rules of physical science, 
has acquired ail intellectual temperament of authority, 
dogma, and decision. The American mind, occupied 
with the study of the moral science in the practice of 
civic rights and the lecture of newspapers, has acquired 
a temperament of doubt in calculating the changeable 
and doubtful relations of policy, morality, and existence, 
which has enabled them to establish the most sublime 
and consummate policy of social union) and without 
the aid of universities, observatories, academies, books, 
pictures, and statues, they have discovered the great and 
dnly science of man and nature, viz. 

That man is a constituent part of a great whole of 
being, co-equal, co-essential, and co-interested in the 
good of time and futurity ; that the dissolution of his 
body expands his interest from the point of self to the 
great circumference of the mundane system), that is, 
the collected atoms, which, in life, are subject to the 
sensations of one body only—The same atoms are 
dispersed by death over the surface of the globe, to enter 
the agonizing modes of millions of oppressed subjects, 
millions of tyrannized slaves, and millions of tortured 
beasts. 

Such is the philosophy of American peasants, that 
holds out such a tremendous lesson to tyrants of every 
description, politic, domestic, and natural) and warns 
the demagogue and wit, or nicknamed philosopher, not 
to disturb the organism of society with his crude systems, 
to purchase a momentary fame at the price of ages of 
future misery, whose improvement depends on the slow 
advancement of human intellect, and not on revolutions 
of power, to accomplish the worship of Nature, which is 
the enjoyment of such a quantity of good in time as is 
e compatible 


( 34 ) 

compatible with circumstances to graduate its perfect 
tibility in futurity. 

What has been the discovery of the star-gazers, but¬ 
terfly-hunters, poets, painters, fiddlers, and logicians of 
Europe ?—Equality, or the rights of man : which silly 
doctrine has generated the civic monster of consular 
power. These sa^es in science, and idiots in sagacity, 
have discovered in their profound philosophy, that the 
matter of a dissolving body goes to sleep to all eternity, 
and has no more interest in existence. Fools ! look to 
the ocean; and when a wave or bubble breaks, say, what 
part of the water sleeps ? 

The imbecility of this opinion will be exposed by con¬ 
templating the breaking and rising of the waves, surfs, 
and bubbles of the sea. Would any man that was not 
quite an idiot entertain any notion of repose, either 
temporal or eternal, to any part of the sea when a surf, 
a wave, or a bubble breaks ? That specific mode of 
water is but transmuted into the surrounding modes, 
and undergoes, in new and divided forms, the agitations- 
of its previous action. 

Just so it is in the great ocean of matter, the bubble 
man, which breaks its specific identity, transmutes its 
atoms into all surrounding modes, and must feel the 
agitation of its previous action ; nor can the loss of 
memory by the dispersion of its parts at all affect the 
sufferance of evil in its i*ew combinations in the sensitive 
system. 

Thus we discover that the philosophy of eternal sleep, 
and the policy of holy insurrection, founded on a chi¬ 
merical equality of rights, has degraded the power of 
science in Europe, while the philosophy of reason, and 
the doctrine of civil liberty, have been carried to their 
acme by the sagacity of unlettered peasants in America. 

Tba 


( 35 ) 

The above reflections confirm the utility and import¬ 
ance of my nesv system of education, to teach sagacity 
instead of science, to think rather than to know, and to 
increase the power rather than the matter of human in¬ 
tellect, as the only means of the attainment of hap¬ 
piness in time, and the progress of perfectibility in 
futurity. 

With a most clangorous peal of my Tocsin I take my 
leave of the American people, recommending to every 
nation and individual that understands the doctrine o£ 
the omoousia, or the unity of all nature, to regard 
America in its true category of human energy in the 
great worship of Nature (the augmentation of good, and 
diminution of evil, in the mundane system in time and 
futurity), the leading point of the ascending arc of 
human perfectibility, and a preparatory asylum for 
mankind, should the continent of Europe be over¬ 
whelmed in alternate despotism and anarchy., ignorance 
and superstition. 


I shall now interpret the language of my Tocsin, 
addressed 

To the British Nation • 

Protective and generative power of nations ! substantial 
trunk of the scions of civil liberty, transplanted in colonies 
over all the world : Nature, regarding the island of Great 
Britain as the citadel of human energy to effect the good 
of time, and advance the perfectibility of futurity, has 
surrounded her favourite isle with the ocean, both to 
guard it from the moral contagion of continental slaves, 
and to protect its moral energy from the physical force 
of numbers, aggregated by military despotism. 

E 2 The 



( 36 ) 

The title of Protector of Nations is not only confirmed 
by the uniform record of history, but by the irre r 
futable evidence of her own constitution. Her wars upon 
the continent were all undertaken to preserve the esta¬ 
blished limits of empires, and thereby support the balance 
of political power, in which her own safety was involved; 
while her constitution and insular situation were a sure 
pledge against all views of conquest over the territory of her 
allies, and made her the safe and disinterested arbiter of 
the civilized world. 

The second title of Generator of Nations, is evinced 
by her colonies. America, her first-born offspring, 
seems to have supplanted her parent in the advancement 
of human energy. The colonies of India are gradually 
advancing towards civil organism, while Botany Bay is 
preparing a wonderful testimony to cprroborate that of 
America, that the scum and refuse of a British popula¬ 
tion are more worthy and more capable of establishing 
civil liberty than all the poets, fiddlers, and painters of 
continental nations: and I will venture to add, that the 
verdict of a jury of British pickpockets at Botany Bay, 
would carry in it more liberality, justice, and disin-% 
terestedness of sentiment, than the sentence of the most 
exalted tribunals of the continent of Europe. 

The powers of the continent have always made war 
to aggrandize their own empire (pretexting the balance 
of power), which their military and despotic forms of 
government facilitated ; and their weaker allies have been 
swallowed up in the vortex of their ambition. Witness 
the fate of Poland, the republics of Dantzig and Thorn, 
and the subjugated allies of the civic monster of consular 
power. 

What are the colonies of the continental powers of. 
France, Spain, Holland, See. ?—Dunghills of human 

depravity, 


no re- 


{ 37 ) 

depravity, degeneracy, cruelty, and despotism: 
publican confederacies appear, as in America, to establish 
and advance human energy; the efforts of the parent state 
are exerted jto resist all establishment and all progress, 
and to retain the colonists in ignorance and slavery, and 
the natives of the country under their cruel oppression. 

Nature seems to have reserved to her favourite isle, and 
denied to all other countries, the capacity of generation 
in colonies to mark her predilection for the preservation 
and perfectible power of England, opposed to the der- 
structive and degenerative power of continental nations, 

I shall now form the peal of my Tocsin in such tones 
of counsel and admonition as may direct the conduct of 
British energy in the worship of Nature ; that is, to co¬ 
operate with all the intelligible powers of existence to 
produce the greatest sum of good in time, and its per- 
fcctuation in futurity to the whole mundane system. 
Nature has bestowed an excellence of intellectual tem-?- 
peramenf uppn the British people, in order to qualify 
jthem to garrison her citadel of human energy. This 
temperament is a peculiar propensity to thought or 
contemplation, which being exercised in the moral 
science, by dwelling long on one and the same propo¬ 
sition, fill all its relations are discovered, and those re¬ 
lations approximated in doubtful equations instead of the 
dogmatical decisions of physical science, that quality of 
prudence is generated which the ancients called, the 
numen of human energy, to discover the difficult union 
of practice and theory, to £njoy and perfectuatc. the good 
qf time and futurity in a comprehensive view of the cog¬ 
noscible relations of man and nature. 

This British temperament of thought, generated by 
Saxon institutions of popular government, nurtured by 
insular solitude, progressing in the administration of the 

laws 


( 38 ) 

laws by juries, and the debates of popular assemblies^ 
exercised in the lecture of newspapers and polemic con¬ 
troversies, written with unbounded freedom, energizing 
by study and travels, ultimately produces that high de¬ 
gree of mental sensibility, or consciousness of perception, 
which seizes upon the nice and solid discrimination of 
things, and constitutes the highest degree of intellectual 
power called sagacity, prudence, or wisdom. 

The inhabitants of the continent, pursuing the know¬ 
ledge of the arts, and physical instead of moral science, 
have improved their memoirs more than their judgment, 
and become loquacious, dogmatic, and thoughtless. 
The arts and physical sciences are all peremptory in their 
rules, and demand no exercise of doubt to generate the 
quality of thoughtfulness, the necessary faculty of moral 
disquisition. Hence ail those philosophic crudities of 
eternal sleep, holy insurrection, and algebraic logic, by 
Condorcet and Kant. 

The characteristic thoughtfulness of the British people 
has generated a physical force, that, if properly disciplined 
and put in action, would enable those exalted islanders 
to subdue the whole world with as much ease as the 
civilized subdue ?ill savage nations. 

Extreme consciousness of sensibility of perception 
generates sympathy, that is, a capacity to feel our rela¬ 
tion with surrounding beings in the sensitive system. 
This produces a spirit of association or sympathy, that 
characterizes the British people as much as the quality 
of thoughtfulness. 

This spirit of association, nurtured by education, and 
exercised by political institutes, is exemplified in the 
military prowess of the soldiers and sailors before the 
late disastrous war of the revolution : the assaults of the 
British army were- at all times irresistible; and there 


was 


( 39 ) 

was not a regiment In the British service that did not 
think itself equal to five of the enemy : and when the 
occasion offered, the opinion became the cause of its own 
confirmation. 

I have myself seen prodigies of power performed by 
small parties of British sailors in foreign sea-ports. A. 
single boat’s crew, armed with sticks, I have seen drive 
before them a whole town armed with knives, swords, 
and fire-arms. In contemplating these prodigies of 
power, I have observed that, in all foreign countries, 
the nature of education and government deprives the 
individual of all sensibility, and consequently of ail sym¬ 
pathy. The absence of these qualities destroys all spirit 
of association ; and when hundreds are opposed to units, 
they become like a field of corn to a single sheaf, which, 
bound together, would level the separate blades to the 
earth wherever it moved forward. 

Thus it is with the British people opposed to foreigner^ 
of every nation: their sympathy unites them into, a 
sheaf, while the want of it separates their foes into a 
field of corn. Every thoughtful Englishman, united m 
3. body with others, has an exalted perception, which 
shews him all the distant relations .of self with associate! 
beings, and an animated consciousness identifies his owm 
force with that of his companions, and multiplies the 
relative force of self and others into a Colossus formed of 
thousands, which the divided numbers of all the armies 
of Europe could not resist. 

To this mode of reasoning, the victories of the French 
army in the late war will, no doubt, be objected, to 
prove the existence of a spirit of association, without 
which no military power can be successful. 

In reply to this objection, I must direct the attention, 
of my readers to the great difference that exists between 

thr 



C 40 ) 

ihe spirit of association generated by sympathy, and 
artificial association generated by military tactics. 

To illustrate this, I will suppose two armies of the 
above description advancing to meet each other in battle; 
the naturally associated army would resist the onset, 
and every individual soldier, identifying the force of his 
comrades with his own, would oppose at every point an 
immutable firmness, which would break to pieces the 
tactical association as a rock the waves of the sea. 

An army associated by tactics alone, unconnected 
with sympathy, cannot form a real assault; their advance 
can only be a feint, or gasconade, to throw the defend¬ 
ing army into consternation, which if it fails, they 
must retreat after a very feeble assault, as was exem¬ 
plified by the battle of Alexandria in Egypt, where the 
superiority of moral association in sympathy triumphed 
over Gallic tactic, indisciplined gasconade, and Insulated 
self without sympathy* 

The British people, inured from their infancy to 
athletic sports and pugilistic contention, are giants 
when opposed to foreigners in unarmed contests. I 
have seen a single Englishman force his way through a 
French mob, by knocking down with his fist every one 
that approached him. And I have been told from the 
most respectable authority of French officers, that 
an English deserter would drive from the barracks the 
whole regiment, until he was opposed by the arms of 
the centinels. 

If such is the prowess of unarmed contest, it is no 
great presumption to suppose that Englishmen must be 
very superior to all other nations in the contest of battle; 1 
and this superiority of bodily force seems a gift of Na¬ 
ture intended to support the moral energy of a nation 
which forms, the garrison of civilized life, and,.the di¬ 
rective 


e 41 ) 

rective power of human energy in the worship of Nature; 
that is, the augmentation of good, and diminution of 
evil, in time.and futurity. 

My Tocsin, in a most clangorous peal, conjures the 
British officers to profit of this characteristic prowess of 
the soldiers, and close immediately with the enemy, and 
thereby make victory certain. 

The Gallic conscriptions of boys can fire their muskets 
and artillery as hard as the stout men of Britain; but 
when these advance in sympathetic union with the 
bayonet, the Gallic children, void of sympathy, must 
save themselves'by flight. 

Let the standard of Britain bear this motto —Forward 
and Close. Thus the British armies, bearing on their 
standard in two words the consummate table of in¬ 
struction, conduct, tactic, and encouragement, the in¬ 
strument of military force would be accomplished, and 
efficient to support the energy of British power to save 
the civilized world. 

I must address a very loud peal of my Tocsin upon 
the present incautious and defenceless state of the me¬ 
tropolis. 

The Tower of London is not intended as a post of 
defence against an external but an internal enemy; that 
is, the disaffected and dangerous rabble of the metro¬ 
polis. The lower orders of the people before the epocha 
of the French revolution, were the most loyal part of 
the community; but the licentiousness and folly of 
opposition papers, duped by French theories, have per¬ 
verted the English temperament of the people. 

None of those loyal huzzas are heard for the king; 
no animating cries in public places for “ Britons strike 
home,” or “ God save the King.” When some honest 
Briton (who has too much good sense to be the dupe 
p of 


c 42 y 

of French theories) calls for “ Rule Britannia/’ he is 
answered by some knave or fool with the call of the 
Marseilles Hymn, or Ca Ira, though these very tunes 
excite nothing but horror, shame, and remorse in the 
minds of the French people who invented them. 

At such a crisis of plebeian disaffection in the me¬ 
tropolis, what ignorance, what stupor, what infatuation 
in Ministers can keep the Tower of London, the de¬ 
pository of two hundred thousand stand of arms and 
ammunition, in a state so accessible, that a thousand 
of the rabble armed with knives, might approach the 
gate, either by land or by water, and seize the garrison 
before they could beat to arms ? 

A single iron gate placed before the drawbridge, 
■would render the Tower impregnable to all sudden 
assault, and with but little interruption to the intercourse 
of passengers. 

The gates should be opened three times a-day, at 
stated hours. When the outer barrier is opened to admit 
the passengers, the inner barrier must be kept shut; 
and when the whole company have got between the two 
barrier gates, the outer one must be shut, and then the 
inner one be opened. This access must be inspected by 
a captain of the guard, who must keep the key in his 
own possession. 

The defenceless state of the national treasury, the 
Bank, is another impeachment of the imbecility of 
human reason in its most exalted state of English pru¬ 
dence and thoughtfulness. The treasure, instead of 
being kept under the guard of one hundred men, should 
be deposited in the Tower. Fifty resolute blackguards, 
armed with knives, might rush into the guard-room, 
and destroy or disarm the soldiers. 

The Bank is the perpetual lure to all the tavern and 

mob 


( 43 ) 

.mob treasons : and if the Tower was rendered inaccessible 
to sudden assault by the simple means of a double bar¬ 
rier* and the Bank treasure deposited therein* we should 
hear no more of alehouse plots and rabble patriots. 

Should these salutary intonations of the Tocsin have 
as little effect as my private letters to Ministers on the 
same subject* I tremble for the fate of the civilized 
world, should the citadel and Bank of England be taken 
by a mob* as a signal for the invasion of the civic mon¬ 
ster who suborned them. 

The intonations of my Tocsin addressed to the legis¬ 
lature of Britain, convey the following counsel to 
effect the preservation of that sublime constitution adapt¬ 
ing itself to the moral temperament of society* growing 
through the slow progress of reform and experience in 
the lapse of ages* and holding out to mankind the cri¬ 
terion of practical policy* while its colonial offsprings 
advance in experiments of social perfectibility* and thus 
rendering the instrument of human agency consummate 
and categoric in the universal machine of Nature. 

FIRST COUNSEL. 

Guard against all extension of popular power in the 
tripartite and delicate mechanism of mixed government. 
The democracy of the House of Commons possessing 
the power of the whole property of the nation* is vir 
tuallv omnipotent, and nothing prevents the anarchy o 
its action but the influence of the crown. 

Statesmen who have more virtue than wisdom are 
disposed to diminish this influence; but the magnani¬ 
mous minister who dares do good without fear of ths 
suspicion of others from the purity of his own con¬ 
science, must support this necessary evil to purchase 
f 2 patriotism 


( 44 ) 

patriotism of ignorant and selfish factions, and contra! 
the preponderancy of democracy in the constitution. 

Members of parliament in possession of property, 
grow tired of 4 wealth, and seek excitement of new desires 
in the pursuit of power ; and we have seen in the most 
dangerous crisis of the country, dukes, lords, and gen- - 
tlemen, joining a democratic faction, while democracy 
was threatening the continent of Europe with the loss of 
the social state. 

If men of property can pursue the fleeting power of 
democratic chiefship at the risk of life, peace,* and social 
order, how intoxicating must be the passion of even 
that low ambition which prefers the power of the,mob 
to the opinion of the respectable part of the community ; 
and how necessary and beneficent is the influence* of the 
crown, that can alone oppose a dyke to its devastating 
torrent! 

We frequently hear the partisans of demagogues ex¬ 
claim, How is it possible for a man of his wealth to seek 
the destruction of civil power ? To this it may be re¬ 
plied, How often do we see men under the influence of 
violent passions pursuing the road to inevitable misery ? 

Locke relates an anecdote of a man afflicted with sore 
eyes, who, when admonished not to drink, lest it should 
cause blindness, answered, ee That he preferred his li¬ 
quor to his eye-sight.” This, however, was a false de¬ 
claration : for, had a person presented himself with a 
bond in one hand to secure a perpetual supply of the 
most delicious wines, and in the other hand an* instru¬ 
ment to inflict blindness as soon as the bond wa^ 
accepted, there is no possibility of doubt where the 
choice would have fallen. 

This drunkard, in the pursuit of his passion for liquor, 

amused 


( 45 ) 

amused his reason with the table of chances, that blind* 
ness might possibly not be the result of intoxication, 
though he could not but observe the most evident danger. 
The habitude of drinking being imperious, reason would 
thus be amused, or kept silent, and his friends would be 
astonished at the temerity of tfis action. 

Such is the conduct of all demagogues and demo¬ 
cratic leaders ; they prefer the draughts of intoxicating 
power of a day, to the very existence of the social state^ 
reconciled to their choice by the chapter of accidents, 
and the powerful influence of habitude silencing the 
operations of reason. 

The popular power in the tripartite constitution of 
England is sufficiently strong to effect a just tempera¬ 
ment in its monarchical and aristocratic colleagues. It 
exists unorganized, and acts virtually in county meetings, 
assembling all the property, information, and respecta¬ 
bility of the people at large ; these assemblies may 
sometimes be called into action by intriguing factions; 
but then their character is immediately discoverable, and 
can never be confounded with those numerous and re¬ 
spectable assemblies which made peace with America, 
saved the constitution from the artful invasion of demo¬ 
cracy, in the form of an India bill, and constitute the 
virtual, efficient, temperate, useful, and constitutional 
sovereignty of the people. 

I shall conclude this topic with one single observa¬ 
tion, which will damn democracy in the opinion of all* 
respectable men, and confine it to its present station, 
the bosom of ardent and inexperienced youth, thought¬ 
less and ambitious men of talent, and the great multitude 
of the rabble. My observation is this; that at all the 
meetings of democrats, whether at the Crown and 
Anchor, or at the Goose and Gridiron, they congra¬ 
tulated 


( 46 ) 

fulated their leaders upon their secession from Parliament* 
because a minority of thirty-five members could not 
force their fanatical opinions of liberty upon a majority 
of two hundred and fifty members, supported by the 
virtual sovereignty of the people (the freeholders of the 
whole landed property of the country), acknowledged in 
the speeches of these demagogues, who used the phrase, 
infatuation of the people : thus, one hundred fanatics at 
a tavern meeting, would impose their silly theories upon 
millions of their fellow-subjects, with the aid of a tu¬ 
multuous rabble, and are not ashamed to insult the un¬ 
derstanding of the public by assuming the name of patriots 
and friends to liberty. 

•I conjure that part of the community, whose inex¬ 
perience and ignorance make them the dupes of demo¬ 
cratic leaders, to consider and examine seriously whence 
their oppressive taxes on porter and windows have arisen. 

The democratic party removed the burden of taxation 
from the shoulders of the wealthy by a repeal of the 
income-tax, instead of a just remodification; this repeal, 
they foresaw, would remove the burden to the shoulders 
of the poor and middling classes, and execute their ne¬ 
cessary and primary principle, to keep the people in a 
state of discontent, as the proper medium of democratic 
influence. 

My Tocsin announces to the poor and middling classes 
of the community, that they never will be relieved from 
their partial and oppressive burdens, till the present 
French and unprincipled democracy is extinct. The 
country, or what is called the independent party in Par¬ 
liament, will never oppose the measures of Administra¬ 
tion, while democracy is watching the favourable mo¬ 
ment to invade it with treachery, treason, and revolu¬ 
tion : the freeholders of the country, in a state of alarm, 

will 


( 47 ) 

will pay their taxes with implicit resignation, and volun¬ 
teers will start forth in towns to support those very taxes 
which impoverish their families, and deprive them of the 
comfort of domestic life. 

Who but madmen would open the door of the house 
to the cries of hospitality, when they see a banditti of 
thieves laying wait to rush in ? O poor deluded country¬ 
men ! desert or despise the banditti of democracy, or 
they will reduce you to the miserable state of the French 
populace, to quit your instruments of commercial and 
comfortable industry, in order to take up arms, to be 
transported to the deserts of Asia; and there, deprived of 
health, comfort, and subsistence, devote life in a scene 
of wounds, bloodshed, and massacre, against the inno¬ 
cent natives, in the cause of some unprincipled and de¬ 
sperate faction, to triumph in luxury, depravity, and 
tyranny, and to extend this deluge of human misery in 
their own country to the boundaries of the whole earth. 

In all countries the energy of civil power is the pro¬ 
tector of the poor; this it is which forces the rich to 
support the burden of taxation ; this it is which esta¬ 
blishes workhouses and contributions of aid to industry 
in times of dearth and scarcity; and those demagogues 
who would diminish the energy of the monarch, are 
enemies to the poor, exemplified to demonstration in the 
revolution of France, where the monarchy was lost, by 
attempting to force the rich to come to the relief of the 
poor, and to meliorate their condition, by ceding their 
feudal and oppressive rights. 

There is not a monarch upon the continent of Europe 
that would not rejoice to humble the rich and relieve the 
poor, if he had powers enough to control and command, 
without fear”of resistance, the great body of wealthy 
proprietors. 



The 



( 48 ) 

The Empress of Russia declared, she did as much for 
the poor as she dared to do, but not so much as she 
wished to do. The conduct of the German Emperor 
Joseph was modelled upon her example. The King of 
Sweden has produced a revolution in his state, with no 
other object than to humble the condition of the rich, 
and meliorate that of the poor. The King of Denmark * 
was rendered absolute by the poorer classes of his sub¬ 
jects, to liberate them from the oppression of the rich,. J 

My Tocsin, in a clangorous peal of intonation, 
holds out this important admonition to England— Main- 
tarn the energy of the monarchy . This cannot be effected 
by any reform in the constitution, but by the improve¬ 
ment of the sagacity and intellectual power of the yeo¬ 
manry, or sovereignty of the people. If this body 
would support the energy of the monarchy to lay taxes" 
upon the faculty, instead of the indigence of the com¬ 
munity, England would become a Colossus of political 
power, that would bid defiance to the enemies, and 
afford protection to the friends of human nature. 

The politic body of a community resembles that of a 
porter, whose strength is multiplied by the position of 
his knot. The European porter placing a knot upon his 
shoulders, brings into action all the stronger muscles of 
the body, and spares the weak; by which means he is 
enabled to carry a weight that he has not the power to 
lift. 

The Arabian porter multiplies his force beyond that of 
the European, by placing the knot upon his hips, and 
leaving all the weaker muscles of the upper half of the 
body without any labour br effort; and thus he is enabled 
to carry a weight which six men cannot lift. 

The politic body, after the example of the porter, 
ghould place the knot of finance upon the opulent muscles 

of 


( 49 ) 

of the community* and spare the weak muscles of indi¬ 
gence ; by which means it would stand under and carry- 
such a burden of public expense, as would crush it 
without this knot of financial economy. 

This knot can never be imposed on the body politic but 
by the energy of the executive power, supported by the 
yeomanry* We every day witness the laborious efforts 
of a minister to impose taxes on opulence. With what 
shameless rejoicing we observed the income-tax repealed, 
and its substitute laid wholly upon the indigence of the 
community, just recovered from the pressure of extreme 
scarcity ! 

Ought we to wonder at the influence of demagogues, 
the increase of jacobinism, and the French nomophobia, 
when the blessings of social order are so counterpoised 
by the oppression of indigence, in throwing the whole 
burden of taxes on the middling and lower classes of 
the people ? 

The loudest admonitory notes of my Tocsin, addressed 
to the British nation, convey this important counsel: 

Construct the knot of finance, and impose it on the 
strong muscles of the body politic. Should these refuse 
their functions, let the Parliament be dissolved, and the 
yeomanry, as in the case of the India bill, will fly to 
the aid of the monarchy, by the return of more patriotic 
and intelligent members. 

The poor of this country demand the relief of another 
alarming grievance, which is the oppression of mono¬ 
poly, to enhance the price of subsistence beyond the 
acquisition of labour, and, by destroying the roots of the 
social plant, prepare its inevitable dissolution. 

This grievance, I fear, can have no relief from Govern¬ 
ment ; it can be remedied only by the improvement of 
intellectual power to increase sympathy, probity, forti- 
© tude, 


( So ) 

tude, and wisdom, by which man discovers his relation 
to nature, and becomes unwilling to promote any evil or 
oppression to trouble the great ocean of being into which 
he must dissolve, and in whose agitations he , that is, the 
same matter dispersed in different identities, must again 
renovate. 

The evil of time, as well as futurity, is powerfully 
imminent in this avarice. Would an affamished people 
take arms against an invading enemy, to protect the pro¬ 
perty of an avaricious and selfish yeomanry, whose land 
would be made the lure of plunder to the conquerors, 
and of vain relief to the oppressed peasantry ? Ireland 
holds out a dreadful example of the oppression of land¬ 
holders, which brings such a ^ass of misery upon the 
people, that all the beneficencerof the English legislature 
cannot relieve, while these stupid bigots rebel against the 
protective power, and, like the brute, bite the stick instead 
of the hand that directs it. 

There is no condition or function in the great machine 
of the politic body that has misery or evil attached to it. 
The pauper in the Workhouse may be as happy as the 
King, if he is treated with humanity; the servant as the- 
master, if treated with lenity ; and the tenant as the 
lord, if treated with justice: the interest of all is iden¬ 
tified in time and futurity ; and the virtues of sym¬ 
pathy, probity, fortitude, and wisdom, cultivated by 
education, must produce the supplementary energy of 
civil power, which law cannot effect, and which can 
alone unite all conditions in one common interest; such 
a state of well-being as cements the union of the body 
politic to render Great Britain the rampart of the civi¬ 
lized world, and the citadel of human energy, in the 
great mechanism of the universe. 

I cannot cease the intonation of my Tocsin without 
giving one loud peal of applause to the greatest minister 

the 


( 5 1 ) 

the world ever produced—William Pitt, the greater off¬ 
spring of a great ancestor. This prodigy of civil ma¬ 
gistracy conducted the affairs of state through the most 
disastrous crisis of human policy, that ever threatened 
the peace of nations, or surpassed the faculties of human 
wisdom. 

Surrounded by a host of national and insidious ene^ 
mies, deserted by vanquished allies, and assaulted by a 
most desperate faction and unprincipled foe, this great 
minister, by a confidence in his virtue, awakened and 
united all the respectable and wealthy part of the com¬ 
munity, in a co-operation of sacrifice of property and 
exertion of power, that saved the British nation, and 
gave by that means a respite to the extinction of social 
life. 

This illustrious and unparalleled statesman, having 
embarrassed his circumstances in the expenditure of 
etiquette to support the dignity of his office, was obliged 
to sell his estate, and retire to live upon a small farm. 
The public papers, though they had adopted all his 
opinions from experience, which had manifested their 
wisdom, made his poverty and embarrassment a subject 
of mirth and insult. 

This great minister ai>d practical philosopher, who 
received the thanks of Parliament for saving the country, 
and the acknowledgment of most respectable merchants, 
that private property owed all its security to his efforts— 
this exalted character, the saviour of social life, now lives 
in retirement and embarrassment, with the peace and joy 
of conscious worth, that no circumstance can deprive 
him of, & lamentable and singular example of the ingra¬ 
titude and imbecility of the most exalted human na¬ 
ture— the wisest and lest of mankind scoffed at and neg¬ 
lected by the wisest and best of nations • 
g 2 


To 





< S2 ) 

To save the character of the British nation from the 
indelible opprobrium that will'eternally attach to it when 
the name of Pitt* shall be mentioned to honour human 
history, I propose a subscription of 200,000/. the one 
half of which to endow and build an hospital for the 
support of all orphan children, who may lose their 
fathers in the battles of their country, to be called the 
Statue of William Pitt, which no impious rabble will 
dare to mutilate, and, while it conveys the memory of 
the hero, will exemplify the work of the man in its 
benificent and grateful institutions. 

The other half of 100,000/. I propose should be laid 
out in the purchase of an estate, and this to be presented 
to Mr. Pittas a mark of national gratitude, but not as a 
recompense for his services, which no property could 
retribute. This subscription should be filled up by 
opulent men only, lest the efforts of generous and 
honest indigence (which, I have no doubt, if applied to, 
would raise that sum in a few hours) might excite re¬ 
pugnance of acceptance in his noble mind. 

This subscription would be signed by every Prince on 
the continent of Europe, as an act of gratitude and ac¬ 
knowledgment of the salvation of social life, if human 
reason had been exercised in sagacity rather than science, 
to make men wise, and not merely witty, and to conduct 
them to real knowledge through the study of man and 
nature; and, till this sole purpose of intellectual power 
is effected, reason must stand below instinct on the scale 
of animal perfectibility. 

I recommend to individuals of all European nations, 
whose sagacity and intellectual powers may be advanced 

* philosophy is not the true constitution of nature, 

the man who sacrifices himself to his country must be an idiot, 

>* 


( 53 ) 

in the adoption of my new system of education., to emi¬ 
grate to America, whose various institutions of moral, 
domestic, and political life, will open a progressive scale 
of exercise to the votaries of sympathy, probity, and for¬ 
titude, which increase in the ratio of intellectual power, 
from the gross perception of savage sense, into the gene¬ 
ralizing energy of a civic philosopher. 

In proportion as the individual advances in sagacity 
and virtue, he will find it essential to his happiness to 
improve his social institutions. The inhabitant of the 
continent may advance these in sectarian and domestic 
society, without* interference or hostility to the govern¬ 
ment ; and should this oppose their establishment, they 
must emigrate, and not attempt to revolutionize their 
own country after the example of French Jacobins, who 
attempted to force the silly theories of a sect upon the 
practical habits and opinions of a vast population. 

Let those individuals in England, whose intellectual 
powers may increase so as to render the practical usages 
of refined and complicate policy disgusting and intole¬ 
rable, emigrate to America, instead of caballing with 
licentious clubs, to impose the opinions of a sect upon 
the great body of the people; by a disastrous revolution, 
which after much bloodshed, anarchy, and despotism, 
must return again to the point from w hence it set out, 
public habitudes, temperament, and opinions. 

The emigration of the wise and virtuous would then 
insulate and expose the clubs of fools and scoundrels at 
the Crown and Anchor, associated with those at the 
Goose and Gridiron, the Hog in the Pound, and the Cat 
and Bagpipes. And the great arch-demagogue;, who 
makes use of this banditti of dissolute apprentices, sub¬ 
orned soldiers, and Cold Bath Fields patriots, holding k, 
purse from the secret service money of France, to decry 

the 


( S4 ) 

the union, to declaim against the British press, the last 
resource of injured nations, and to call out Peace ! while the 
enemy of nations and nature is preparing the desolation 
of Europe;—this arch-demagogue, whom fools have 
dubbed with the name of a great man, because he made a 
great noise, without ever effecting one wise measure in all 
his political career, would then appear a real monster* 
by endeavouring to undermine British power, the ram¬ 
part of social life, and the last hopes of the human 
species, to enjoy a few years of power and wealth, sur¬ 
rounded by the applause of the mob, and the hisses of all 
the respectable and worthy part of the community. 

I should not have condescended in these pages of phi¬ 
losophy to have taken any notice of an unprincipled 
demagogue; but having heard compliments paid to his 
talents from men of talent, I appeal to all honest and sa¬ 
gacious men, whether the coalition, the regency, the India 
Bill, and the late speech in Parliament, do not exemplify a 
dereliction of principle and defect of talent. The man who 
can declare, that he would prefer being a slave to a con¬ 
queror rather than a free general to a nation of free mer¬ 
chants, may be a worthy representative of the rabble, or a 
professor of politics in the French Institute (qualified no 
doubt by his sentiments explained on a late trip to Paris) ; 
but he is unworthy of being a member of the British le¬ 
gislature, or to bear the name of an Englishman. 

I shall take the liberty to suggest my suspicions of the 
arch-demagogue’s late trip and long residence in Paris. 
My readers will no doubt be able to recollect the conduct 
of all the demagogues in all those countries that have 
been absorbed into the vortex of the civic monster. 
These desperate leaders ha ving received a lettered education, 
that enabled them to talk rather than to think, put 
themselves at the head of a rabble which became con¬ 
temptible 


( 55 ) 


~temptible and odious to all the respectable part of the 
community; having lost the confidence of the virtuous, 
they attached themselves to the power of France, and by 
betraying their own country into its hands, the vicious 
and the ignorant have become the governors of the vir¬ 
tuous and the wise in all these miserable and enslaved 
countries. 

I think it a wise and justifiable suspicion, to suppose 
the English arch-demagogue w T ent to Paris to receive in¬ 
structions upon the plan of indivisibility of the western 
family of the world; and upon those means of support 
from French powers which were to place the tavern asso¬ 
ciations over the respectable assemblies of the legislature; 
and, after the example of Holland, Switzerland, Ger¬ 
many, and Italy, to place the vicious and ignorant 
French partisans over the wise and virtuous patriots 
of the country. 

Democracy is rendered so contemptible from expe¬ 
rience, in all countries, that it can have no hopes of suc¬ 
cess but from the power of France. But when I con¬ 
template the unbounded power of the Consul to employ 
the whole treasure of the country in secret service; that 
is, subornation and corruption of other countries; I 
tremble for the fate of the civilized world. I am not at 
all consoled by reflecting on the contemptible state of the 
party who support it, and, according to a late Minister’s 
speech, numerous in taverns, but nothing in the Strand. 
Domestic contempt impels them to foreign support, and 
the thoughtless licentiousness of their character disposes 
them to the most desperate enterprises. 

I do not suspect the arch-demagogue of receiving 
money or hire; but I maintain, with the conceptions of 
common sense, that his presence at those levees in Paris, 
which true-hearted Britons regard with contempt and 



3 


abhorrence. 






( 56 ) 

abhorrence, spoke this plain language : “ I the arch¬ 
representative of the English rabble. ' paying 'homage 
to your power, give you full assurance, that the tavern 
patriots of England, like those of Switzerland, are ready 
to co-operate in the great end oi -advancing consular 
power, as the oak round which their ivy is to grow i 
that upon my return to Parliament I will mention 
French ambition in soothing terms; and call for peace, 
peace, peace, till the whirlpool of consular power com¬ 
bining and swallowing up, one after another, the lesser 
lakes of Europe in its own torrent, shall burst its dykes 
and inundate the whole civilized world. 

I will draw artful and insidious comparisons be¬ 
tween the arms of conquering heroes and the interested 
wars of merchants ; and while honest men are puzzled 
where to rest their greatest abhorrence, when the page of 
history presents the wars of tyrants thirsting after blood 
and slaves, or sordid Dutch merchants selling the princes 
of Java to increase their pocket-money; while history 
leaves mankind in this doubtful predicament /1 will seize 
the sly occasion to make it a parallel question, w hether 
the wars of France, to overthrow social order and bru¬ 
talize the human species, are not to be preferred to the 
protective wars of England, to support social order, to 
generate civic nations into colonization, and to save the* 
world ; the first being a nation of soldiers and conquerors, 
and tlie last nothing but merchants and men. 

<c Thus will I pursue, and obtain by sophistry and 
cunning, what I have long failed to obtain by eloquence 
$nd wisdom, the throne of a day, though the loss of 
social life should pay the price of it.” 


The 


( 57 ) 


The Tocsm addressed to the Swedish Nation. 

My order of appeal to nations will be conducted by the 
scale of their energies, and not that of titles or magnitude. 
After the civic population of America and Great Britain, 
Sweden takes the lead among continental nations in civic 
energy; that is, the attemperament of sovereign power, 
by constitutional laws to guard the identity of public and 
private interest in law, liberty, justice, and national inde¬ 
pendence. 

I have no particular measures of policy to recommend 
to this nation and I should have classed it in my general 
address to dependant nations, had not its exalted rank of 
energy demanded that homage of attention which I hope 
will draw the regard of all states, to protect its advancing 
energy towards the perfectibility of the human species, 
the common interest of all mankind. 

Sweden stands in the neighbourhood of a powerful 
nation, that could invade and conquer it, and conse¬ 
quently force upon the people a system of laws inconge- 
nial to. their temperament, foreign to their customs, and 
contrasted with their principles : such a conquest would 
involve the country in extreme misery, and excite in it a 
perpetual jealousy of the Russian empire. 

The civic monster, France, is too far removed to 
awaken apprehension; and it is much to be dreaded, that 
the jealousy of neighbouring states, of conquest, and 
foreign laws, will conceal from them the distant advance¬ 
ment of French power, that will overwhelm the civic 
state of mankind, and substitute to civil power a camp 
discipline, that will organize a perpetual alternation of 
military despotism and civic anarchy; a state more to 
H be 

4 » 



( 5 * * 

be dreaded than the transfer of the laws of Asia to tfe 
European empire. 

A change of legislation might be grievously felt on the 
sudden, but time would wear it into reconciliation, and 
new laws would only change the mode of personal secu¬ 
rity ; but military power, establishing itself on a system of 
expediency, would abolish all law* and civil power, and 
perpetuate a state of anarchy, that no custom could re-* 
co'ncile, and no rising generations be inured to by habit 
and education. 

Sweden, and all the dependant and lesser states of Eu¬ 
rope, have but one remedy to preserve them from the 
encroachment of neighbours, or the vortex of the civic 
monster ; which is> to labour with- all their influence and 
counsels to establish a congress of civilized nations as the 
only barrier to the power and the ambition of the civkr 
monster of France, and a proper check to the lesser 
danger of neighbouring encroachments. 

Europe has been for many ages a virtual confederacy’ 
of civilized nations, whose laws of nations and general- 
policy to preserve a balance of power have guarantied to 
every state or member, whether strong or feeble, those 
customs, laws, and habits which education has found 
to be the criterion of their happiness, and their organism 
in the general machine of human society. 

The French revolution has-destroyed this-confederacy, 
and removed the barrier which secured to nations an ap¬ 
propriate medium of existence, conformable to custom* 
education,, and climate. The military discipline of 
French anarchists is now transferred to the peaceful 
shepherds of the Alps, to the merchants of Holland, 
the farmers of Italy, and the mechanics of Germany £ 
and when these oppressed people complain, that the civic 
monster has given the laws of the forest to the fish in the 


sea. 


( 59 ) 

-sea, and vice versa , they are answered by bayonets anti¬ 
brigades. 

My Tocsin, in a loud peal to feeble and inferior na¬ 
tions, recommends this motto to be inscribed on their 
standards: 

A Confederacy of Nations is the Guardian of the social 
State. 

Should this confederacy be effected, and the peace and 
prosperity of nations preserved, let the great instrument 
of education be set at work, to discipline the powers of 
the mind in sagacity, rather than the matter of the mind 
in science. 

Such a system of education I have invented, and shall 
shortly publish for the benefit of mankind; it demands 
no innovation in the present mode, but only exhibits to 
masters and tutors the neglected scene of the play-field; 
whose sports, games, and contentions, might be con¬ 
ducted after an happy art to inculcate sagacity in the 
skilful conduct of games, and to discipline the will to sub¬ 
ordination and order, in strict obedience and observance 
of their rules ; and thus, by teaching men how to think 
rather than how to learn the arts and science, every sub¬ 
ject would be disposed and enabled to view the complicated 
relations of good and evil; and thus acquiring a habit of 
contemplation, to meditate, deliberate, and examine the 
.evidence of all questions. Those silly theories of natural 
liberty, natural equality, and natural society, would no 
longer be made the subjects of inflammatory declama¬ 
tions of demagogues, to excite the ignorance and fana¬ 
ticism of the people to insurrection and anarchy. 


% 



A Peal 


( 6o ) 


A Peal of the Tocsin addressed to Austria. 

The conduct of Austria in the Russian campaign 
against France has held hut an impressive admonition to 
the continental powers on the subject of their partial 

jealousies. 

The Austrian commanders, jealous of the power of 
Russia, and instructed no doubt by their orders, deserted 
the successful army of Russians in the campaign of 
Switzerland, and turned the tide of victory in favour of 
France. This fatal jealousy, adopted rather than op¬ 
posed by the British Cabinet, disgusted the Emperor of 
Russia, who withdrew his victorious forces, and left Eu¬ 
rope to its fate; which has produced a civic monster 
that must swallow up all social order, unless a confederacy 
of nations should be formed (in a bond of common in¬ 
terest and sacred pledge of fidelity, free of all jealousy) to 
oppose and destroy it. 

The Russian campaign was the auspicious tide in the 
ocean of human affairs that w 7 as neglected, to have placed 
the Bourbons on the throne of France. The armies of 
France move perpetually in a torrent of impulse, either 
forward or backward, as victory or defeat attends them. 
The Russians had thrown them into the torrent of defeat; 
and if Austria by desertion had not exposed the extreme 
inferiority of numbers of the Russians, a defeated French 
army would never have rallied, and Europe would have 
been saved in the re-establishment of those systems 
/which the experience of ages has prescribed, and which 
the principles of civilized life demand, as indispensable to 
the repose of nations, and identified with the moral tem¬ 
perament and improvement of human nature. 

This admonitory lesson of the stupid jealousy of Aus- 

3 Uia* 


( 6i ) 

tria, which brought the ene'my to the gates of its capital, 
and endangered the annihilation of the Imperial throne, 
carries in it such meridian evidence of precept and ex¬ 
ample, that if the continental powers do not profit by, their 
minds must be in a state of infantine imbecility. 

The Russian, Austrian, and Prussian empires have 
been for ages in hostility, and not an inch of territory- 
lost in their contentions; while the civic monster in one 
campaign has swallowed up more kingdoms and re¬ 
publics than would equal their united empires. 

In the face of this awful catastrophe, these nations are 
quarrelling for the orts of the monster (indemnities), 
which he has thrown down to amuse them, while he 
advances to seize upon new kingdoms and republics as a 
necessary aliment to his voracious and desolating am¬ 
bition. 

In the last century the ambition of Lewis the Four¬ 
teenth, by adding Flanders to his empire, excited the 
jealousy and alarm of all the states of Europe: whereas 
the Consular ambition which has now added t-o France the 
immense conquests of Italy, Switzerland, Flanders, 
Germany, Holland, with Spain and Portugal in abso¬ 
lute dependance, seems to have a contrary effect; to 
divert jealousy from France, and confine i.t to a partial 
jealousy of each other. Among the independent empires 
of Europe this infatuation of princes must b^ attributed 
to the stupor of consternation, or profound hypocrisy* 
which puts on the aspect of hostility towards each other, 
to guard against the suspicions of the civic monster^ 
who would punish their frowns and fears with the im¬ 
mediate loss of empire. 

The sounds of my Tocsin call loudly upon Austria to 
set on foot, with the utmost secrecy and expedition, the 
confederacy of Russia and England with her own empire; 

Prussia 


C 63 ) 

Prussia cannot be made a party* because its fears and 
unprincipled policy would betray the secret negotiation 
to the monster, 

Prussia* kept in a state of neutrality* would wait the 
issue of the war, and would join its forces to the tri¬ 
umphant party* with the most ardent wishes for the 
success of the confederacy, which it would be cautious to 
conceal. But should the civic monster triumph* it 
would join its forces* to fatten upon the orts of its con¬ 
quests* and to purchase the privilege of being the last 
morsel for its insatiate appetite of ambition and conquest. 

The civic counsel contained in the peal of my Tocsin 
addressed to the Austrian empire* is* to suppress all in¬ 
flammatory publications, and to encourage all jcalm and 
philosophic inquiries into the nature of moral truth : but 
above all* to direct in the regulations of all schools* that 
the hours of play should be equal to the hours of study ; 
and that the master* or his usher, should attend in the 
play-field, to teach sagacity in the skill of play* and dis¬ 
cipline of the will* in an orderly* benevolent* and fair 
execution of the laws qf play, Thus the discipline of thp 
powers of the understanding would keep pace with the 
methodizing of the matter ; that is* sagacity would ad¬ 
vance in the parallel of science, and the contemplation of 
conclusions with the observation of facts. Thus men 
would be taught to think as well as to know; and subjects 
no longer being the dupes of moral or political fanatics* 
the social plant would preserve its complicated organism j 
the roots, .branches/ trunk, and leaves* satisfied with the 
necessity of their subordinate functions, would circulate 
the sap of knowledge and sagacity, to produce the fruit 
of actual and perfectible good in the sensitive system 5 
unaided by any didactic rules of doctrine* the mind* like 
the plant* would vegetate ii>to melioration. 


A Peal 


( 63 ) 


A Peal of the Tocsin addressed to the Russian Empire . 

Russia stands in a high predicament upon the scale of 
human energy, to effect the worship of Nature, the aug¬ 
mentation of good, and diminution of evil, in time and 
futurity, in the mundane system; surrounded by Asiatic 
nations, whose extreme ignorance makes human life a 
state of torture and misery ; one half of the species, the 
female sex, shut up in dungeons ; the male sex exposed 
to the most atrocious military despotism; no law, no 
justice, no security for life or property, which is often 
forced from subjects and foes by instruments of torture, 
which inflict death after all has been surrendered. 

O Alexander, what a momentous station of human 
energy Nature has placed you in ! The civilized nations 
of the western hemisphere implore your aid to save 
Europe from the jaws of a civic monster, that would 
extinguish social life, and introduce the military barba¬ 
rism of Scythian ages. 

Hasten then to negotiate a secret confederacy with 
England and Austria, that may chain and destroy the 
monster, and save the western world. 

Extend your protective power to the Asiatic nations, 
that, the bloody tyranny being extinguished, the natives, in 
the bosom of peace and security, may turn their minds to 
the education of sagacity instead of knowledge; by which 
mean the plant of social organism will vegetate to fructi¬ 
fication, through a spontaneous process of improving 
laws and institutions; keeping a parallel with the im¬ 
provement of intellectual power in the establishment of the 
press, which superstition opposes ia those countries,, 
and which can be effected only by European conquest. 

While you turn your regard to these important rela^ 

tions 


f 64 ) 

tions of sel^ in the mundane system, you must not ovef ~ 
look the centFe of its power at home. Take care of your 
senate, and do not divide with it too much of your per¬ 
sonal authority; the best of your subjects have more 
knowledge than thought5 that is, knowledge has filled 
the mind with an ample observation of facts in literature 
and science. But thought has not produced the capacity 
of contemplation to examine the numerous recondite re¬ 
lations and delicate discriminations of the moral science. 

Your subjects must not be trusted with power or pri¬ 
vilege, till a new system of education shall have taught 
them to think rather than to know, to contemplate as well 
as to observe, and to discipline the powers of the mind in 
sagacity rather than the matter of the mind in science. 

I have visited your empire, and studied the moral and 
intellectual temperament of the people; 1 have found 
them at the lowest grade of mental sensibility, conse¬ 
quently prone to precipitate action and conspiracy, and 
totally incapacitated to participate any privileges of sove¬ 
reign authority. 

My Tocsin, in the most sonorous and alarming peal, 
cries, <c Concentrate your power, and do not divide it till 
my new system of education shall have produced a 
thoughtful temperament throughout all classes of your 
subjects, not taught in schools or colleges, but in the 
bosom of domestic life, by the tuition of parents to their 
own children.” 

The simplicity of my new system of education might be 
taught to any man of common sense in less than a month 
by the lecture of its own rules, without any aid from a 
master, or any farther explanation than its own text. I 
wait to publish this important work, the pecuniary suc- 
«ess of my future labours, which if they should fail, the 
manuscript must risk its loss in a descent to future ages, 

till 


( e 5 ) 

till it meets that improving energy of intellectual power 
which may recognise its worth. 


The Tocsin addressed to Prussia . 

This country, governed by those systems of civil power 
congenial to the moral temperament of its inhabitants, 
and calculated, through a well-modified liberty of the 
press, to give progress to the understanding without in¬ 
flaming the passions of its subjects, stands in a most 
respectable predicament of human energy, to effect the 
worship of Nature, the augmentation of good, arid dimi¬ 
nution of evil, in time arid futurity, in the mundarie 
system. 

The present awful crisis of the civilized world advances 
the predicament of Prussia to the very acme of human 
energy. If the prince upon the throne possesses wisdom, 
and fortitude, he will rise from his present state of drivel¬ 
ling policy and contemptible fear, and joining his arms to 
the confederacy of nations, the balance of force will 
so preponderate against the civic monster, that its de¬ 
struction will be certain and instantaneous, to effect the 
salvation of social life. 

The Tocsin clamorirs in the ears of the Prussian 
monarch confederacy and education: by the first he will 
save the world, and by the last he will save his own coun¬ 
try and himselfi 

In Prussia, literature is cultivated by all classes of 
people, following the impressive example of a late philo¬ 
sophic monarch ; should revolution take place in that 
country3 the faculty of observation, awakened and diffused 
over the whole population by science, would generate a 
discord that would beggar all the descriptions of French 
dissension, confined to a few learned demagogues, 
t 


The 



( 66 ) 

The education of sagacity, instead of science, must be 
iustantly established, that the great mass of lettered scio¬ 
lists being taught how to think rather than how to know, 
the public mind will be enabled and disposed to contem¬ 
plate subjects in all their relations, and not merely to 
observe insulated facts. The words Liberty and Equality 
will be related by law and civil power; the people will 
discover the complicated relations of civil society; order 
will be preserved; and the plant of society, maintaining its 
organism of laws, institutions, and customs, accommo¬ 
dated to the will and understanding; education will 
cause it to fructify into actual and practical good, and 
advance it in the cultivation of intellectual power, to the 
graduating perfectibility of future ages. 


The Tocsin addressed to Denmark, 

The energy of this nation is so insignificant upon the 
scale of human power, that I should not have particularly 
addressed my Tocsin to it, but to warn it against the 
recommission of such political errors as have conveyed 
such indelible disgrace upon Danish policy, as no time 
will ever wear into obliviscence. 

I allude to the Northern coalition effected by Denmark 
against England, when it was carrying on war against 
the common enemy of mankind, acknowledged by the 
French themselves on the inauguration of Consular 
power. 

What was the pretext for this sacrilege against human 
nature ? Ages and nations of futurity will shudder with 
indignation at the answer : That Great Britain would not 
suffer them to smuggle arms and ammunition upon the 
coast of France, the common enemy of the civilized 
world. 


The 



( 6 7 ) 

The record of this disastrous and unnatural coalition 
against England (whose constitution and interest offer a 
pledge of peace, protection, and security, to all nations) in 
favour of France, whose military despotism had deluged 
one half of Europe with desolation, anarchy, $nd misery, 
and threatened the other half with the same fate—the 
record of this coalition, dissolved only by the accidental 
death of the Emperor Paul, blazons on the page of his¬ 
tory, a damning evidence of human imbecility, to teach 
this important lesson to mankind, that the science of all 
ages and of all nations can do nothing to advance intel-* 
lectual sagacity ; which can be acquired only by a disci¬ 
pline of the power instead of the matter of the mind. 

This inestimable discipline which I have discovferedj 
I shah soon promulgate. I recommend to the Prince to 
diffuse it throughout all his dominions, as the most bene¬ 
ficent and wise system of instruction that ever was offered 
to the human species ; because it has no concern with 
doctrines or opinions of any kind, teaching man how to 
think, and not what to think, as children are taught to 
walk, without being directed to any particular road. 


The Tocsin addressed to inferior and dependant Nations* 

The intrigue and ambition of France have diffused over 
all these countries a spirit of faction and disorganization 
that will reduce them to a complete state of dependance 
on the protection of her military power. The partisans of 
this country, kept in pay and active service in all populous 
towns, will not permit these countries to form any per¬ 
manent or independent constitution, which would not be 
so easily controlled by French agency as the nominal and 
popular forms of military expediency. 

These unhappy countries must submit to French 
1 2 authority. 



( 68 ) 

authority, and wait the auspicious moment of deliverance 
from the confederacy of the superior nations, which will 
identify their own independence with that of the lesser 
states; and must save all, or be themselves involved in 
the French vortex of military expediency ; without law, 
without credit, without commerce, and without system. 

I recommend to these states, before the imminent 
chaos of social order shall take place, to diffuse my system 
of education and instruction over all their territories. The 
sagacity produced by it will be a good substitute to law 
and civil power 5 the people, rendered less ferocious and 
more thoughtful, will accelerate the cessation of anar? 
chy, and return to such systems of accommodative 
government as may suit the advancement of intellectual 
power in the great mass of the people. 


A Peal of the Tocsin addressed to France, 

O tremendous nation! great in territory, population, 
and power; but the last and least of all nations in moral 
energy, to effect the worship of Nature, or the co-ordina¬ 
tion and co-operation of human power, to augment good, 
and diminish evil, in time and futurity, in the mundane 
system — 

Your revolution, through a series of bloody and un¬ 
principled factions, has generated a civic monster, that 
has no form, no constitution, no power that accommo¬ 
dates itself either to thte social system or the moral tempe¬ 
rament of mankind; it presents, indeed, a camp disci¬ 
pline to check the fury of civil war during the life of the 
Commander in Chief; but the succession of chiefs en¬ 
tails a periodical civil war to future generations. 

The present military system, hostile to commerce, to 
credit, and to civil law, to man and nature, while it checks 

internal 



( 6 9 ) 

internal dissensions, transfers a civil war to the great con* 
federacy of civilized nations. The subsistence of a military 
nation cannot be industry, but plunder; and that want of 
occupation at home which would disturb internal quiet, 
must be provided for by external war, plunder, and deso¬ 
lation of its neighbours. 

The last revolution of the Consulship seems to have or^ 
ganized that volcanic matter of factions, which, feeding 
on its own entrails, must have formed in a short time a 
vacuity, and sunk down in extinction. The Consular 
power has formed a regular and periodical volcano, 
which may last for ages, to devastate to an incalculable 
extent every system of social order throughout the whole 
population of the human species. 

The moral temperament of the French people, nurtured 
in pleasure, garrulity, arts, and science, has lost all capa¬ 
city and propensity to thought or contemplation?; the 
mind is subjected to momentary impulse; the scoundrel 
of the day is the hero of the morrow; and, vice versa , as 
success conveys power, the idol is adored with the pro¬ 
stration and devotion of oriental slaves. Mind and body, 
liberty and property, are all putin requisition; and in the 
hands of a resolute chief they are as much a physical 
mass as his horse or his sword. 

I am fully convinced, that if the conscripts of France 
were ordered to the conquest of China, or even to wage 
war with the baboons on the coast of Angola, not a man 
would dare remonstrate or refuse to embark. 

It is notorious in the reign of Robespierre, that one 
single Jacobin would fill with terror the most loyal popu¬ 
lation of a whole province, and compel them to take arms 
with hypocritical enthusiasm, in the very cause they ab¬ 
horred. From this fact there arises in my mind a very 

important 


( yo ) 

important reflection, which may convey the most in¬ 
structive admonition to all Europe. 

Is it possible that a people who betray such pusilla¬ 
nimity as citizens, can change that temperament into 
valour by putting on the coat of a soldier ? and does not 
this fact demonstrate with irrefutable evidence, that the 
defeated and consternated armies of Europe have been 
humbugged by French gasconade in mob assault } 

This moral temperament of prostrating impulse t to 
imposing power, observed first by Cardinal de Retz, a 
French minister, who said the French people must be 
governed by a rod and a rattle, holds out the present 
military system of France as the most dangerous calamity 
that ever visited the human species, or threatened vio¬ 
lation and even annihilation to the worship of Nature; 
that Is,, the co-operation of human energy to advance the 
good of the mundane system in time and futurity. 

The ambition of a military chief, supported by a na¬ 
tion of thirty million of thoughtless people, who can be 
led naked, famishing, wasting with disease, by the sound 
of a drum and the cry of glory, to spread their own 
anarchy and wretchedness upon peaceful and happy 
nations, breaking down the barriers of nature which 
guaranty the enjoyment of those laws and customs 
which education has established to prevent the French 
giving laws to the German, the Barbary States to the 
Spaniard, or the Chinese to the Turk, may thus destroy 
that mechanism of society (the guarantee of local hap¬ 
piness, the enjoyment of educational propensities), best 
formed to promote the gradual progress of instruction, 
the only legitimate conquest that can force the barriers 
of natural distinction, and unite the world. 

The institution of a military conscription is the worthy 
offspring of a civic monster : this strikes a dagger into 

the 


( 7 1 ) 

tlie heart of social life. The great end of human asso* 
eiaiion under all forms and all localities, is, to gua¬ 
ranty to every man the exercise of a profession agreeable 
to inclination and education. Those who prefer indus¬ 
try, sobrietry, and order, will follow a civil profession; 
and those averse to these virtues will follow the profes¬ 
sion of arms. 

The law of conscription blasts this inestimable -eco¬ 
nomy of civic life, by forcing the industrious to the 
camp, and the lazy into their disgusting occupations 5 
and thus violating the temperament of individuals, the 
people are made wretched, and the army receives a bad 
information. The merchant of a feeble constitution, 
whose industry gains to his country several pounds per 
diem, is forced to the camp ; while the robust peasant, 
formed for the toils and dangers of the field, and who 
gains but a shilling, is left to his peaceful labours, and 
the libertine is debarred from his favourite profession. 

This dangerous institution, the birth of a revolution¬ 
ary monster, will oblige all nations to adopt it as a matter 
of necessity to equalize their force; and all European 
nations will be degraded into military tribes of civilized 
savages, fighting for the extirpation of each other in a 
state of mental insanity, caused by mistaking science for 
Sagacity. According to the poet— 

“ Good sense pursue, the greatest gift of Heaven, 
u Though no one science fairly worth the seven.” 

When we contemplate the dissolute morals accom¬ 
panying military systems, the universal corruption and 
peculation which must be tolerated in offices of admini¬ 
stration, where every thing must be bought and sold 3 
the tribunals of justice appointed by such administration % 
the metropolis of the empire setting at defiance the laws 

of 


( 73 } 

di morality, which are respected by all nation*, 
turned into a fair of brothels and gaming-houses to 
spread that dissipation and wretchedness which, by era-" 
dicating all habits of virtue and industry, proposes re¬ 
cruits for the army, or wretches for the scaffold; and, by 
decoying all the youth of Europe to this sink of moral 
pestilence; the world is more alarmed at the progress of 
its vices than that of its victories; the latter threatening 
only the subjugation of the body, while the spreading 
infection of the former threatens the extinction of all 
intellectual worth. 

If the calamity of French power should not be ar¬ 
rested in its career by the confederacy of all civilized 
nations, mankind must wait the auspicious arrival of a 
comet in the orbit of the earth’s attraction to swallow 
the world in its vortex, and by anticipating ages and 
cycles of human misery, constitute and concentrate the 
worship of universal nature in benign destruction. 



The Tocsin addressed to Bonaparte. 

You stand as an individual upon the pinnacle of human 
energy : every single portion of your conduct may impress 
upon the current of sensitive life an agitation or tran¬ 
quillity that thousands of ages cannot efface. 

You stand like a wave in the ocean, agitated by the 
convulsions of your own passions; and when this identity 
breaks, the matter of the body disperses itself into innu¬ 
merable points of contact, to suffer the agitation of its 
own impulse when collected in the previous unitary point 
of identity. 

To exemplify and illustrate this important truth of 

5 my 


4 


( 73 ) 

lhy revelation, I will suppose the case of the first mart 
who made a slave of his fellow-creature. This action 
has continued in the current of the sensitive system for a 
known period of three thousand years from the Grecian 
olympiads : and it is highly probable that it existed thirty 
thousand years before that. 

This slave-maker dies} that is, the matter which 
composed the identity of master dissolves, and disperses 
itself over all the globe. It is highly probable that some 
of those dispersed myriads of atoms may enter into the 
bodies of millions bf slaves, and thus multiplying its 
sufferings by millions of identities in ages of duration, it 
has purchased the mistaken pleasure of one identity of 
sixty years in time, with the pain of incalculable extent 
as to substance and duration in futurity. 

As to this important revelation of the laws of matter, 
made by the ancients as well as moderns, the first ac¬ 
knowledged all matter to be in a state of fluxion or per¬ 
petual circulation; the latter, as Toland says, (C Materia 
fnoriente nasciturJ y Pope says, “ All forms that perish, 
other forms supply/’ I am, however, the first author that 
ever examined the elements of this opinion, and revealed 
it in all its consequences of interest and essence. 

I have never heard any objections preferred against the 
facts which are demonstrable from the science of che¬ 
mistry, but only against the consequences of interest 
between one identity in time, and a successive one in 
futurity. This objection is argued by observing that, 
upon the dissolution of the body, all memory of identity 
being lost, its subsequent combination loses all interest 
with precedent modes. 

To this objection I reply, that interest attaches to 
matter itself, and not to identity. Those atoms in the 
case above cited, which dissolved in the identity of 
K master. 


( 74 3 

master, and,afterwards entered the mode of slave, must* 
feel all the anguish which they inflicted upon that mod 
in their precedent mode of master, though they have na 
remembrance of their change or transmutation from 
mode to mode bv dissolution or recombination. 

There is another objection started against the suc¬ 
cessive interest of matter, which is, the confinement of 
bodies in mausoleums, pyramids* and coffins. This will 
appear a very futile objection, if we consider the laws of 
matter in cohesion and fermentation, which govern all 
matter, whether in an organized or unorganized state. 

The dead body changes its matter by emission and 
absorption,’ as much as the living body : without this 
change there could be no such quality as concretion or 
union of atoms. The dead body, however hermetically 
enclosed by coffins, mausoleums, &c. must have inter¬ 
course with the finer fluids, as electricity, aether, and 
gravity, to whose access the pores of the densest bodies 
are as a house-door to a fly. 

The dead body in the tomb does not gravitate towards 
fhe coffin or the stones, but to the earth’s centre, where 
it circulates in union and interchange of atoms with the 
whole mundane system. 

I have thought it advisable to conduct my Tocsin 
addressed to you, with an increased evidence and expo¬ 
sition of the unity of essence and interest of all matter j 
to impress-your mind with an awful influence of concern 
that may induce you to translate your transcendent 
energy from the scale of evil where it now operates (to 
consternate the world, like the approach of a comet), to 
the scale of good, where it may advance the perfectibility 
of the human species in the same ratio as it threatened 
its retrogradation. 

The first measure my Tocsin dictates as the inceptive 

action 


( 75 ) 

action of your worship of Nature is, to suffer surround¬ 
ing nations under your protective power, to return to 
those systems of government which conform best to 
their locality, customs, habits, opinions, and education. 
This change will not remove them from the influence or 
dependance of France, but only enable them to return to 
that state of industry, order, and prosperity, which may 
form a happy example and influence on the population 
of France itself. 

In the policy of France, your energy, however in¬ 
auspicious in a wide and speculative view, has never¬ 
theless produced a temporary suspension of anarchy, 
and a disposition of subordination, order, and authority: 
this may prepare the people for that great catastrophe 
which the worship of Nature and the salvation of the 
human species demand, which is, the re-establishment 
of hereditary monarchy in France, and the ancient dynasty 
under it, as the only system of policy suitable to great 
empires, as demonstrated by the experience of all ages, 
all nations, and all human history. 

This momentous catastrophe may be produced with 
the same facility as a review on the plains of Sablons. 
Send for Louis the Eighteenth to Havre, meet him there 
with your Consular guard, conduct him to Paris, and 
announce his restoration by couriers to the armies dis¬ 
persed and divided previously over all the country. 

To appoint Louis as a successor, would be as futile as 
to appoint any body else ; for when you die, your senate, 
like the praetorian guard, will put the empire up to 
auction, when the longest purse will succeed, if the 
longest sword should not previously have shut up both 
the auction-room and the auctioneers. 

You will shudder at my proposal because you can 
have no confidence in French faith, and therefore no- 
K 2 thing 


( 76 ) 

thing but personal fear in the restoration of a king, If 
you acknowledge, however, those laws of nature which 
my Tocsin has revealed, your dread of royal resentment 
will be removed by the immense retribution of interest 
to your dissolving and recomposing matter in an incal¬ 
culable futurity, by preserving the organism of civil so* 
ciety. 

The success of restoration by the means I have recom¬ 
mended cannot be doubtful, when you reflect that the 
dastardly Robespierre, with the assistance of a few bar¬ 
bers’ boys, in a Jacobin club, directing five hundred 
armed ruffians from Marseilles, forced the pusillanimous 
mass of the French people into democracy, destroying 
commerce, credit, and subsistence, putting life, property* 
and person in requisition, to march naked and aflamished 
into remote countries, destroying others, by themselves 
destroyed. 

If a poor dastardly Jacobin could force the people to 
adopt a system of misery and anarchy, what may be 
expected from a hero at the head of a determined body 
of well-disciplined soldiers, to give the people of 
France what ninety-nine out of a hundred demand, a 
system of government congenial to their habits, which 
may restore them to peace, commerce, order, and 
prosperity, and enable them to. uphold and re-establish 
the broken confederacy of Europe, as the great anchor 
of social organism, which, being cultivated by the im¬ 
provement of intellectual energy, may place the human 
species in its true category of action or worship of Na¬ 
ture, by the enjoyment of practical, and the advance¬ 
ment of perfectible good to the whole sensitive system ij| 
time and futurity ? 



( 77 ) 

Havxng finished my appeal to nations, I shall devote 
my conclusion to take a comparative view of the revela¬ 
tion of mystery, or religious faith, and the revelation 
of reason, in their influence on human conduct. 

There is no instance in all the records of history that 
the mysteries of faith or religion ever impeded the massa¬ 
cre of the human species in national wars; they have 
been the perpetual pause of all civil wars, by confounding 
the intelligible duties of civil society with the unintelligible 
mysteries of faith, Every man can appeal to the dictates 
of common sense, and the universal experience of com¬ 
mon life, to confirm or refute the facts of policy, while 
the opinions of mystery can have no appeal but to fancy 
and to force. 

It has been the common opinion of mankind in all 
$ges, that though the mysteries of faith may have no 
influence on the policy of nations, yet its influence is 
salutary and indispensable upon individual subjects, to 
preserve the order and peace of society. 

My experience in travels from one extremity of the 
globe to the other, with the sole object of man for my 
study, contradicts this vulgar opinion. I have observed 
in all countries that morality followed an inverse ratio of 
religion. 

From the east to the west I have observed, that in 
those countries where there was most religion there was 
least morality. Jn China, religious duties are incessant, 
and introductory to the most trivial action of human 
conduct; yet, in this country, there is not the least ap¬ 
pearance of a single virtue ; sympathy, probity, forti¬ 
tude, and wisdom are unknown, and a general system 
of fraud, treachery, and cruelty pervades all human 
conduct. 

In proceeding westward, we meet the Tartars, who 
have less religion than the Chinese, and much more vir¬ 
tue. 




( 7 § ) 

fTie. Next come the Turks* among whofn superstition 
diminishes in a few grades* and virtue again increases. 
Next to these we meet the Germans* whose virtue far 
exceeds the Turks* but whose religion is an exact pro¬ 
portion less. From the German Empire we pass over 
into England* where they are obliged on a week-day to 
pay a few old women to frequent the churches* or they 
must be shut up. In this country* where every gentle¬ 
man is almost an Atheist, and every plebeian more of a 
moralist than a religionist* virtue is carried to its acme. 
The honesty of the plebeian, the candour and sincerity 
of the merchant, and the honour and integrity of the 
gentleman, are characteristics of Englishmen* and con¬ 
tradict with strong evidence the vulgar opinion of the uni¬ 
versal and indispensable influence of religion. 

Among the lower classes of people of all nations* I 
have observed shame to be the primum mobile* or 
strongest motive of moral action. What prevents the 
peasant from committing crimes beyond the reach of 
law* and punishable only by the loss of character ? No¬ 
thing but shame. What makes the populace of towns 
more disposed to debauchery and theft than villagers ? 
The facility of concealing their shame* and finding asso¬ 
ciates in vice, which keeps off the horror of contempt. 

The instantaneous reform of convicts* when sent to 
the American colonies, amounts to a full demonstration 
that shame is the primum mobile, or most powerful mo¬ 
tive of all human action. The felon, hardened in vice* 
the habitude of shame lost in the conciliation of asso¬ 
ciates, and the disposition totally demoralized; this very 
degenerated and unnaturalized human being, transported 
into a society of honest peasantry, returns suddenly to 
the temperament of shame, like the elastic curve of a 
bow to a straight staff when its string is unbent. 

What stupendous influence of shame we see exhibited 


in 


( 79 ) 

in an army or fleet, where the most ignorant and insen* 
sible part of a population, as soldiers and sailors, confront 
all the horrors of human sufferance, disease, famine, 
wounds, and death, with a firmness, of mind and coun¬ 
tenance, that nothing but the dread of contempt can 
generate in common minds ! 

It may be objected to this influence of shame, that 
religion produces the same effect, as evidenced in martyr¬ 
dom and crusades. To this I reply, that religious enthu¬ 
siasm affects only fanatics and bigots, but moral shame 
affects all mankind without distinction, and proves its 
influence paramount to all other motives. 

These reflections are not intended to impeach the truth 
of religion, but its influence only to dispose pious and 
moral men to be less apprehensive of those sceptical writ-r 
ings and philosophic systems which call man to assert 
his prerogative of reason, and to make it the criterion of 
all intelligible thought and action, to effect the worship 
of Nature, the augmentation of good, and diminution of 
evil, in time and futurity, to the mundane system. 

This great essay will operate upon its own scale with¬ 
out interfering with that of religious mystery, which has 
been a clue of social discipline for ages ; and without 
some wide experiment, the question of its influence 
cannot be determined; but I conjure all pious men, 
friends to human nature, not to oppose the progress of 
sagacity, because it may diminish the sanctity of mystery 
or the latitude of faith. 

The laws of nature, to produce the general harmony 
of system, have placed all objects of human* existence 
within the reach of human intelligence ; and it w^ould 
have been as preposterous to have placed the food of the 
human body in the clouds, as the aliment of the mind out 
of the reach of experience; or, in other words, to have 
made the medium of sight invisible, by which the eyes 
l would 


( 8o } 

would have become useless as the medium of knowledge 
unintelligible, by which the understanding would have 
become an ignis fatuus. 

To exhibit this important criterion of thought and 
action on the scale of experience, I shall review my dis¬ 
covery of the unity of essence and interest of all matter. 
Of this fact we have the clearest intuitive knowledge in 
the dissolution, dispersion, and recombination of all 
bodies into one another; but nature refuses all physical 
experience to ascertain the duration of atoms in the 
different modes of circulation, or to determine at what 
period the human body may pass beyond the sphere of 
its own mundane action, by circulating into spheres 
remote from the solar system. 

The important fact of unity of essence and interest 
in all matter, would be a useless discovery to human in¬ 
tellect, if it was not accompanied with a scale of ex¬ 
perience. For this purpose, the laws of nature have 
happily substituted moral to physical experience in the 
Sensations of pain and pleasure. 

The affection of sympathy is the first law of the moral 
world, as gravity is of the physical world. These laws 
of sympathy graduate the instructive scale of moral ex¬ 
perience as a substitute to physical experience, in pro¬ 
portion as we sympathize with the whole sensitive sys¬ 
tem, accommodated to circumstances in time, in that 
very proportion we perfectuate the condition of that sys¬ 
tem in futurity. 

I shall exemplify this scale of moral experience as an 
efficient substitute to physical experience, by taking no¬ 
tice of the laws of England made for the protection of 
the brute species, and exposed on a post in Smithfield 
market. 

These laws, which mark the transcendent superiority 

of 


( 8i ) 

of the intellectual energy of the British nation over all 
people of the globe, provide for the humane treatment of 
cattle in a mode conformable to the usages, customs, and 
necessities of civilized life. This humanity to the brute 
recoils its beneficence upon the centre of its own action, 
and promotes that moral sympathy which administers 
in alms-houses, hospitals, workhouses, and liberal do¬ 
nations in times of scarcity, a relief throughout the whole 
body of the community, which the nations of the con¬ 
tinent are totally deprived of. 

This effect of sympathy, graduated upon the scale of 
actual good, that is, so modified as to meet the predi¬ 
cament of life (instead of a total emancipation of the 
brute species from slaughter and labour, which might 
disturb the order of society), forms that sensational scale 
of experience, which nature has substituted to an im¬ 
possible physical experience, to pursue and measure the 
great intuitive fact of the unity of self and nature, in the 
dissolution and recombination of all modes of matter 
into one another throughout the universe. 

This sympathy of the British nation spreads its rela¬ 
tions to the whole human species, generating those pro¬ 
tective wars which glorify her history in the protection 
of the Protestant republics, in the protection of the house 
of Austria, in the preservation of the balance of power, 
the sheet anchor of civilized nations, the protection of 
Turkey, of Egypt, and of Portugal, without receiving 
any recompense or increase of territory, which her con¬ 
stitution forbids, and with no other hope than the pro¬ 
gress of civil liberty throughout all the population of the 
globe. 

Such is the graduated scale of sensational experience 
to conduct man through all the modifications of intelli- 

L gence 


f 82 ) 

gence to effect the worship of Nature, the augmentation 
of good, and diminution ot evil, in the mundane system. 

Some of my readers may probably'make the following 
reflection upon this scale of experience, to measure the in¬ 
terest of human action and human existence. We are 
sensible that the social condition ot the present generations 
must be entailed upon their successive generations, as 
modifications of the same dissolving matter ; and that the 
power of princes and legislators may transmit much good 
or evil to their own changeable, but not annihilable, 
essence. But it appears to us, from the discovery of such 
laws of nature, that individual energy of subjects has 
little or no motive for action upon the scale of universal 
interest. 

To these reflections I reply, that individual action has 
more influence on the establishment of custom than 
legislative action on the establishment of law. Custom 
generates the habit of candour and sincerity, which is 
the soul of private and public happiness, both moral and 
physical. Custom generates that spirit of liberality 
which participates a just profit in all relations of com¬ 
merce and labour, known only among the civic inhabit¬ 
ants of Great Britain. 

Custom modifies the relations of domestic life, of 
husband and wife, parent and child, master and servant, 
the great medium of human felicity. 

All these customs are the result of individual action, 
and hot of legislation, and effect human felicity far 
beyond the energy of law and government. 

To these arguments for individual energy, I shall add 
some physical reflections, that every individual body 
dying in the bosom of its own family, disperses a very 
great proportion of its atoms in its own domestic sphere;. 

3 that 


( 8 3 ) 

that the living bodies of wife, children, servants, and 
cattle, incorporate much of them before their funeral, 
and thus the dying agent is modified into the living 
patient, to enjoy or suffer his own domestic laws. 

It may probably be objected by some, that these atoms 
may have a quick circulation through the different bodies, 
and thus not remain long the patients of their former 
agency. To this I reply, that, as every atom is the ge¬ 
nerator of the identity, (which means succession of sensa¬ 
tions, not sameness) of all bodies, it perpetuates its in¬ 
terest and essence to all subsequent generations of the 
human species, while the atom itself may be far removed 
beyond the visible system of the universe. 

These consequences of the great fact of unity of interest 
are mere speculations, and the individual must appeal for 
information to the great scale of experience, sympathy , 
which will inform him by the indubitable evidence of his 
own sensations, that his own domestic happiness will be 
in an exact ratio with the happiness of all his dependants j 
and that sympathy, probity, fortitude, and wisdom, are 
those virtues whose economy forms the great Scale of ex¬ 
perience in the moral science, to constitute the art of hap¬ 
piness, that is, the enjoyment of all possible good in 
time, which will be the exact measure of all perfectible 
good in futurity. 

I have followed in this important and inestimable dis¬ 
covery of the laws of nature relative to human existence, 
the example of the most pious men, who exposed natural 
truth, though in apparent contradiction with themysteries 
of faith. 

The Book of Mystery declares the sun stood still; Co¬ 
pernicus discovered and declared it never moved. Ihe 
Book of Mystery announces a witch shall not be suffered 
to live; the learned judges of all nations have declared, 
l t that 


o 


( 84 ) 

that there is no such thing as a witch in nature, and have 
expelled the charge from all their tribunals. 

The Book of Mystery says, the world was created in 
seven days ; the pious Sir Isaac Newton has proved by 
his laws of light, that the fixed stars could not become 
visible in as many years. 

These pious sages determined by their example, that 
where the language of mystery contradicted the positive 
laws of nature, and maintained two to be the half of six, 
or the part greater than the whole, it behoved mankind 
rather to suppose they did not understand the mystery, 
than to deny the truth of nature, or oppose the progress 
of human intelligence, as the great energy of universal 
nature operating in the mundane system. 

In following these illustrious examples of pious men, I 
have discovered that the qualities of all bodies follow the 
dispersion of their substances; and that when a violin is 
broken, and its atoms dispersed, those atoms must lose 
their musical quality, and acquire that of the substance 
into which they are recombined. Just so it is with the 
human body in dissolution; the atom that unites with a 
cabbage will vegetate and not think ; and those which are 
again recombined in the intellectual system, will have no 
recollection of their former identity, while they suffer or 
enjoy the consequence of their previous agency. 

In this discovery of natural truth I have not opposed 
the doctrine of mysterious faith, as my illustrious prede¬ 
cessors have done. I have only filled up the great chasm 
of chronology between the common course -of nature for 
perhaps millions of ages, till the dispensation of mystery 
and faith shall commence on (indefinite period) the day 
of judgment, to give a new creation to the universe. 


The 



( 8S ) 


The last and loud Peal of my Tocsin addressed to all Indi¬ 
viduals characterized with the Powers of Sagacity 
opposed to Science . 

I conjure in the sacred names of Truth and Nature, 
every man of mind to promote a new system of educa¬ 
tion which I shall soon publish; calculated to augment 
the powers of the understanding by the most simple art of 
discipline of the thoughts and faculties, in contrast with 
the present mode of education • to teach knowledge by 
augmenting the matter of thought instead of the powers 
of thought. 

At the present unparalleled crisis of imminent discord 
and anarchy, when the military power of France 
threatens the loss of social life to the whole civilized 
world; what event could be more propitious than the 
discovery of the moral and physical laws of the universe? 
It resembles the fate of the aloe, whose plant dies when 
its flower bossoms. 

This Tocsin, the flower of human intellect, if its 
counsels should not be able to save the plant of social 
life, will at least have generated the seed of human 
perfectibility, that may lie dormant and sound till the 
moral climate and season of circumstances may propitiate 
its cultivation, to resuscitate the civic state of man as esta¬ 
blished and lost in the British empire. 

I conjure all pious men to lay aside their jealousies of 
the progress of the human understanding, that it may 
undermine the fabric of religious , mystery . By pro¬ 
moting the imbecility of mankind, in order to keep them 
within the pale of the church, the same imbecility will 
render them the victims of the insidious declamation of 
demagogues to perpetuate civil dissension of nations in 

alternate 


( 86 ) 

alternate despotism and anarchy. The happiness of 
human life can be acquired only by sagacity, or a 
proper exercise of human reason upon the scale of expe¬ 
rience 5 beyond which all is mystery, and reason has no 
power. 

What can we reason, but from what we know; 

And from a real what search in experience why ? 

The duties of domestic, moral, and political life must 
all be founded on clear and intelligent principles, amenable 
to experience. Such is the province of reason, with 
•which mystery cannot interfere without producing in¬ 
terminable discord, bloodshed, and anarqhy, as exempli¬ 
fied in all the revolutions and civil wars of nations. 

Religious mystery, while it is used as a clue to social 
order, may or may not be beneficial to the enjoyment of 
actual and the advancement of future good 5 a question 
which the improving reason of ages will bring to the test 
of experience. But to confound the evidence of human 
policy with the belief and conjectures of religious mystery 
Would be to perpetuate eternal discord, darkness, and 
desolation to the whole human species. 

All revelations of mystery are liable to be superseded 
by subsequent revelations, and to lose their sanctity in 
the progress of intellectual power. The revelation of 
reason attempted in this essay, if it is a just exposition 
and discovery of the laws of nature, must be established, 
and not superseded by any subsequent discoveries ; and 
must acquire strength in the parallel advancement of in¬ 
tellectual sagacity. 

The laws of man and nature understood, 

Prove one same essence, interest, power, and good. 

I have 


( «7 ) 

I have written the foregoing essay with no other mo¬ 
tive than to develope the energies of my nature in the 
great worship of the universe; and in so doing I feel 
that I have not merely existed as an animal, but I have 
lived as a man. And to those readers who may acknow¬ 
ledge the truth of my philosophical doctrines, I recom¬ 
mend the preservation of this w'ork, and its translation 
and dispersion in all languages among all nations, as the 
highest act of self-interest, identified with universal good 
in time and futurity* 


THE END. 



0 





The Author of this Work proposes to read a Course of 
Lectures upon the Human Understanding, to exhibit a 
discipline by which its powers may be increased without 
any reference to doctrines or opinions. To these Lectures, 
nine in number, will be added three discourses ; one on 
language, one on education, and the last on human 
knowledge. 

They will commence the first of March, at No. 40, 
Brewer Street.—Tickets, at Two Pounds the Subscription, 
may be had. of the Author, at No. 9, Lower James Street, 
Golden Square. 


Printed by S. Gosnell, Little Queen Street, Holborn. 








appendix* 


All human energy is derived from intelligence* directed 
W experience. Whatever is unintelligible, and whatever 
is placed beyond the reach of experience, can have no 
relation of consequence with human nature. 

I recommend to pious men, who may be jealous of 
the power of reason, lest it should annihilate the in¬ 
fluence of religious faith, to search into the various de¬ 
scriptions and classes of people hostile to monarchical 
institutions, and they will find the votaries of supersti¬ 
tion, the pious sectarians, as Presbyterians* Moravians, 
Baptists, Methodists, and Quakers, form the advanced 
phalanx, or covering party, behind which the unprin¬ 
cipled demagogues lead on the dissolute, the desperate, 
and ignorant rabble. 

I have been informed by many well-meaning zealots, 
who have frequented the popular societies at all their 
meetings, that, if it had not been for the presence of 
some pious sectarians, the number of abandoned and 
unprincipled characters which appeared there would hav» 
excited in their minds a disgust and abhorrence so strong, 
that .they must instantly have retired. 

In all the revolutions of nations, religion has perpe¬ 
tually taken the lead. The famous revolution in England, 
and the recent one in America, spread about their fury 
from the sectarian pulpit; and the monster of all revo- 

m lutions, 

' 



( 9 ° ) 

rations, in France, was accomplished by the clergy, who 5 
called out to the soldiers, when sent by the King to dis¬ 
perse the deputies at the Tennis-eourt, Your priests 
are here f* at which exclamation the soldiers retired, and 
anarchy commenced. 

If we inquire i-nto the cause of hostility between reli¬ 
gion and government, which it seems to support, we 
shall discover it in the imbecility of the human mind, 
ignorant of the laws and relations of man and nature. 

The bigotted sectarian or religionist believes that the 
more he sacrifices of actual good in the interest of self, of 
family, of country, the more he will enjoy of future 
good, when the dispensation of mystery shall take place 
at the indefinite period calk'd the day of judgment, 
when the universe shall put on a; human personification, 
to punish those who have not performed unintelligible 
mystic rites in the sacrifice of family, country, and self. 

Such a belief disposes them to adopt the silly theories 
of liberty and equality, preached by turbulent, ambitious, 
and unprincipled demagogues; and though they are. 
persuaded these doctrines must subvert the order, peace, 
and comfort of society, yet their fanatic preachers assure 
them, that temporal misery and adversity is the only 
road to the new Jerusalem in eternity. 

I shall address a clangorous peal of my Toesin to 
bigots of every description. 

Whatever may be the laws of mystery, or whenever 
they may commence, they never can supersede the laws 
of nature. 

For example, if the farmer would produce a harvest, 
he must plough his ground, sow his seed, and weed the 
soil, k would avail him nothing, in the order of cause 
and effect, to sow and, to reap, if he were to sing a song, 
to dance a hornpipe, or to take a pinch of snuff. 


In 


C 9 1 ) 


In the same manner, the psalms, prayers, and pro¬ 
strations of the bigot avail nothing in the chain of cause 
and effect of human life, to produce actual and improv¬ 
able good, which must be effected by education, instruc¬ 
tion, and social policy, to place the human mode of 
being in its true category of existence, the enjoyment of 
actual good in life, as commensurate with future good 
in death, or successions of new life; and the prostra¬ 
tions of the bigot to effect this purpose would avail as 
little as the dancing of the farmer round his plough to 
the fructification of his soil. 

The tremendous prospect of human misery, from the 
Catholic population of Ireland, animates my resentment 
against bigotry. Here we observe three millions of our 
fellow-beings, with the strongest passions and weakest 
intellect of all the human species, absolutely incapaci¬ 
tated to think, that is, to consider subjects in all the 
variety of their relations; their minds are but little 
elevated above instinct, which reasons from simple sense, 
unaccompanied by the multiplied perceptions of reflec¬ 
tion. 

These monsters, led on by priests as vicious and 
Ignorant as themselves, massacred, in the late rebellion, 
their own fellow-citizens, because they could not believe 
that the universal power qf nature, 

‘ Which burns in the sun, and blossoms in the trees. 

Thinks in the man, and whistles in the breeze,” 

was personified in a biscuit, swallowed by the priest, 
and evacuated in human ordure upon a dunghill. 

This atrocity was perpetrated in Ireland at the end of 
the eighteenth century, when the bigotry of Catholicism 
has disappeared in all other parts of the world, expelled 
by the enlightened intercourse of impro/ing knowledge. 

m 2 Should 

v .. - jjjf 



( 9 Z ) 

Should these monsters ever acquire power as an inde- 
pendent nation, and, like France, necessitated to adopt 
a military government (for fools and knaves can have no 
other) to extend their dominion, the worship of nature 
would be annihilated, and mankind, forced into Catho¬ 
licism, would be obliged, by the powers of an inquisi¬ 
tion, to torture and incarcerate their bodies with pe¬ 
nance and convents, to brutalize their minds with super¬ 
stition, to obtain the rewards of such insanity in a 
mystical Jerusalem. 

Thus the human mind, as a constituent part of uni¬ 
versal power in the mundane system, would be obliged 
to pervert its own laws, and to cultivate evil for good, 
and thus perpetuate a chaos in the moral world. 

These reflections excite in my mind such horror and 
indignation against superstition, that I am disposed to 
annihilate it, even to its source; for it resembles the 
polypus, that if a piece is left unbruised, it will generate 
a whole. 

As I have been a great advocate, in all my writings, 
for the perfectibility or improvable state of human na¬ 
ture, it may be objected to this Essay, by some well- 
meaning advocates for reform, that I have been too 
hostile to the popular party in a country of constitutional 
freedom. 

To this I reply, that philosophy must always be the 
friend of rational liberty ; that I shall always promote 
reform of administration, and parliamentary vigilance 
over the executive power; but this vigilance and reform 
must be conducted by a most respectable opposition, 
having the support of the yeomanry in county meet¬ 
ings, and not town-hall rabble, connected with tavern 
mobs, whose ignorance, turbulence, and blind devotion 
to demagogues have been the bane of liberty in all 

ancient 


( 93 ) 


ancient and modem republics, where the constitution 
was always destroyed and lost by the violenpe of the 
multitude, and in no instance by the ambition of the 
prince, which can make no encroachment till the licen-* 
tiousness of the mob, and the apprehensions of anarchy, 
offer the most legitimate pretext for its commencement, 
growth, and consummation. 

A contemptible opposition, that puts itself at the head 
of the rabble, when the country party abandon it with 
suspicion of treason to public execration, must invigorate 
the executive power, and make it inaccessible to all 
impeachment and all reform ; and the true friend to civil 
liberty will ever be more jealous of the preponderance of 
the popular than of the executive branch of the consti¬ 
tution. 

In the body of my Essay I have denominated the 
government of France a monster, that is, a mode of 
civic existence that has no organic members, with a total 
incapacity to generate an offspring, or state of social 
order. 

This sentiment will be explained and justified, by a 
survey of its diplomatic conduct, and its internal admi¬ 
nistration of the civil power. 

The style of correspondence maintained with foreign 
powers has betrayed an extreme ignorance and disregard 
of the relative duties of states to each other, and of the 
laws of nations, by a tone of imperiousness used only by 
uncivilized nations. 

The difference of respect paid to ambassadors,when Lord 
Cornwallis was permitted to pass in his carriage a certain 
place at Paris, and all others prohibited, is another usage 
of Asiatic nations, which is repugnant to the dignity and 
hostile to the federal policy of European states; and the 

silence 

° : ' ' Jb ^ 


( 94 - ) 

silence of insulted nations is a proof that they are panic- 
struck at the appearance of the monster. 

This diplomatic conduct shews the incapacity of the 
government of France to uphold the relations of policy 
with surrounding nations., and proves it a monster in 
the confederacy of civilized states. 

To these instances of diplomatic incapacity and bar¬ 
barism, I shall add two more : the embassy of Sebas- 
tiani to the republic of the Seven Isles, where he sent 
for the officers of state, and ordered them to release their 
prisoners, without any application to government. The 
ambassador who had insulted the Portuguese govern¬ 
ment and violated their laws, was impudently sent back, 
to mark the most profound contempt for the nation who 
was base enough to receive him. 

With the foregoing evidence of incapacity to uphold 
the important, dignified, and peaceful relations of na¬ 
tions, is it possible to expect the internal peace of 
France, or the external peace of surrounding nations, 
till the ancient monarchy is restored to that unhappy 
country ? 

The administration of the internal affairs gives the 

most accomplished evidence on the insubordination of 

the military power to the civil ; that France has nq 

organic members of a civic state, and must therefore be 

a monster: this is proved by the present state of the 

army at St. Domingo, which demands, for its safety, 

immediate reinforcements. 

> - 

These reinforcements, it is understood, cannot be 
taken from the immense army of regulars in France, 
because they are repugnant to the service ; the govern¬ 
ment, therefore, has been obliged to delay this critical 
service till recruits can he levied in foreign countries, and 
5 prepared 



( 95 ) 

prepared by discipline; in which time and delay the 
army of St. Domingo must inevitably be lost. 

By these few reflections I think I have justified the 
appellation of monster, given to the form of government 
in France, which must excite the dread of all civilized 
nations, to fall under the conquest of a military banditti, 
without laws, without principle, and without govern¬ 
ment. 

The Greeks, the Romans, the Medes, the Persians, 
when they conquered countries, brought with them 
only a change of power, but no loss of protection ; but 
France, when she conquers other nations, before she 
has conquered herself, that is, established organic power 
or constitutional government, offers nothing but a vortex 
of desolation and anarchy to all nations within the sphere 
of her dominion and conquest. 

Among Asiatic nations obedience follows power in 
all revolutions; but among European nations, commerce 
and science have formed such an enlightened intercourse, 
that revolutionary power, however strong it may be at 
a particular erisis, can have no site or duration but in 
public opinion, sentiment, and habit. 

Civilized nations resemble individuals in society; if 
civic organization is dissolved, a state of anarchy ensues, 
which must generate despotism. In the same manner, 
nations, when the balance of power is lost, must enter 
into a state of contention that will necessitate the resti¬ 
tution of a confederacy in the laws of nations to force 
the adoption of lawful power on that country which 
threatens the destruction of civilized life, by its own 
anarchy or incivic power. 

The system of education proposed in the body of my 
Essay, is to discipline the heart and head in virtue and 
sagacity, rather than the memory in letters and science; 

to 


to teach men to think, and use the powers of reason, 
rather than to know a mass of useless science. 

The criterion of intellectual power, or what is called 
wisdom, is a capacity to multiply perceptions, or relations 
of a subject, to form the greatest mass of evidence, for 
judgment to calculate its approximating probabilities of 
decision. 

Science is hostile to this temperament of sagacity, be¬ 
cause it habituates the mind to closed propositions, and 
gives, no exercise to invention or search of more evidence 
to determine the nice and difficult approximations of the 
moral science. 

Sciolists, or men of letters called authors (who read 
enough to make themselves witty, but do not think 

enough to make themselves wise), defective in judg¬ 
ment, from the too great exercise of memory, form 

another phalanx to cover the atrocity of demagogues, 

who court the influence *of the' monster, to. give them 
the throne of a day, though they must foresee, from the 
example of all history, that whenever a foreign nation, 
acquires influence over a’nother, subjugation must inevi¬ 
tably follow, and the suborned, demagogues will be the 
first victims of its conquest. 

I now take leave of my readers with this immortalizing 
reflection, that the labour of this Essay (which is but a 
specimen of the more important works I have ready for 
the press, on the subjects of education, language, the dis¬ 
cipline of the understanding, and human knowledge) has 
done more to develope human energy in the mundane 
system, than all the power of kings, the arms of heroes, 
the riches of nobles, and the pens of authors, throughout 
the annals of human history. 

M THE END. 

r ' , ' V f ; ■ •. 4 

GosNf.LL, Primer, Little Queen Street; HoToortw 





















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